SAP Agile Data Preparation is a self-service application designed to provide powerful data manipulation capabilities while being simple enough for every user. It removes the factor of dependence on IT development that plagues traditional approaches to data analysis. Based on SAP HANA, it uses the SAPUI5 interface to ensure smart data integration and smart data quality.
The software has a myriad of tools that affords you maximum freedom and ease in data preparation. Here are some of its major benefits below:
- Interface: the interface is not only beautiful but also smart and user-friendly. It follows the spreadsheet model to ease up the classification of data for clearer insights.
- Data exploration tools: it is easy to quickly identify issues wrong with data you have entered, such as blank spaces or duplicated entries. Depending on your data set, SAP ADP smartly recommends corrections to improve data quality. Data sets can also be smoothly combined with one another while the software guides you through the whole process.
- Collaboration: you can easily share the data with other members of the team where each member can see and review every other person’s actions. Multiple roles including data stewards and business data analyst can work together in real-time (since it is based on the cloud) to fine-tune data.
- Data sharing: Since it uses the spreadsheet interface, data sets are exportable into other formats such as Excel, XML, and CSV and to any business intelligence (BI) tool.
Important Features
To any software, one has to be familiar with its most important features. SAP ADP banks on the ease of accessing and using its functions to carry out seemingly difficult tasks. To the right of the spreadsheet, there is a list of common actions to exploit your dataset. The list of actions available changes depending on the column selected. But the actions you are most likely to use include add formula column, cleanse worksheet, remove duplicate records, export worksheet, action history, etc. The formula editor enables you to apply advanced HANA functions; then you add a column to carry out the required operations. Just like every other part of the SAP ADP, the advanced formula editor is also easy to use.
- Remove duplicate records: to polish the quality further, selecting the ‘remove duplicate records’ automatically duplicate entries based on its matching policies, to which you can likewise make adjustments to suit your peculiar needs. When this is done too, it opens a statistics window that shows you the number of duplicate records deleted.
- Cleanse worksheet: the cleanse worksheet option refines your dataset by automatically identifying issues that need to be resolved. When the columns to be cleansed are selected, you can make your own adjustments by adding or removing fields before running the operation. Once done, it opens a window of Data Quality Statistics giving summarised information about what you have cleaned in numbers and an intuitive chart. The application also adds new columns for the cleaned data so you can easily compare data before and after cleaning.
- Merging data: this is a complex process that can lead to many errors with other software, but not ADP. A wizard guides you through the whole process giving you information complete with illustrations to help you understand exactly what you are doing and how it would impact your dataset. The combined dataset then gets are separate worksheet within the project for you to continue your work on.
- Actions history: ‘Actions history’ keeps a record of all the actions you take. This helps you to easily review all you have done manipulating the data and also undo unwanted actions or actions made in error. Unlike Excel and other software that only allow you to undo one action at a time, you can go back several actions to undo anything with SAP ADP.
- Data sharing and collaboration: the beauty of collaboration on SAP ADP is how everyone, working in real-time, can work to improve the quality of the data by sharing insights on the project and reviewing each other’s work through the ADPUI5 interface. You can also easily download and export the data to other platforms. ADP makes the job even easier for data stewards, who can export their rules into a central repository and reuse the information for other projects instead of having to enter the same rules all over again. Other data stewards, when granted access, can also use the same or similar use for new projects.
Conclusion
Amidst many data preparation applications available, why use SAP ADP? It’s because it features an intuitive interface with powerful functionalities that can be exploited by any user. You can carry out the most difficult actions on other software with a few clicks on ADP without having to write a single line of code. This makes you work on projects faster, simpler, and with fewer resources. With SAP ADP, you can truly unlock the power in every dataset, acting upon them to make better decisions in your business.
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