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Data, Data, Everywhere – SAP Analytics Rapid-Deployment Solutions

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(Some data trends are easy to spot 😉 )

What’s the problem?

Analytics refers to the software and methods that your organization uses to make sense of the mountains of data that reflect your business.  In these days of Big Data, organizations (and governments, for better or worse) now have the real ability to look for hidden patterns and trends in order to uncover and act on opportunities and risks.   In fact, organizations that aren’t able to quickly convert data to information, information to insight, and insight to action, will quickly lose the competitive advantage.


The difficulty is that the raw data in this value chain resides in complex ERPs, as well as a myriad of other business-relevant data sources.   Because the data in SAP or other ERP can be considered, analyzed, and presented in so many ways, the approach must be specific to the business.  Relevant data needs to be extracted.  Here’s the simplified flow:

  1. Find the right data to extract, and convert that data to information
  2. Derive insights and understand patterns in the data
  3. Determine the actions that need to be taken

Obviously different solutions have different needs.   Your organization may want to uncover hidden revenue opportunities, control the risks of raw material price fluctuations, gauge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, predict the likelihood of equipment failure, gain insight into your most (and least) profitable customers, and even predict those customers most likely to leave your business.

Simplify, simplify, simplify


It’s clear that analytic solutions can provide you with the tools and insights you need to make the best business decisions, day in, and day out.   If you could get analytic capability in place to leverage your existing business data and technology roadmap, what would that look like?   What’s the best approach?

Here are common-sense requirements for any enterprise implementation worth considering:

  • Leverage your existing investments in transactional systems – any analytic solution should easily integrate with what you already have in place, bringing additional value, insight and control
  • Make it easy to migrate to new technologies (mobility, in-memory computing, cloud, etc.)
  • Shield your IT department (and business users) from complexity, while leaving the door open for customization and scalability
  • Select the best visualization tools for the job – i.e. don’t use a hammer for everything
  • Start with proven best practice content specific to your business processes – you’ll benefit by using a solution that distills years of experience implementing analytics solutions
  • Wherever possible, use pre-engineered software and implementation accelerators, rather than custom solutions
  • Start small. Use building blocks designed to work together across all your business systems and processes.
  • Select a vendor with a strong partner ecosystem, offering a wide range of deployment, hosting and financing options

SAP provides a wide range of compelling solutions in the analytics rapid-deployment solution portfolio, but all share the above benefits and strategies.   The solution portfolio for Analytics is far more extensive than we can cover here, so I’ll provide an overview of some highlighted solutions, and look more closely at individual solutions, including the soon-to-be released Predictive Analytics sampler, in future articles.

Consumer Analytics

SAP HANA Sentiment Intelligence rapid-deployment solution helps you gain insight into market trends and customer perception of your brands and products by combining structured data with unstructured data from online channels like social media, wikis, and more.

Implement in as little as 10 weeks

SAP Trade Promotion Effectiveness Analysis rapid-deployment solution is a role-based dashboards and alerts solution with pre-built analytics (including “what if” analysis) and key performance indicators analyzing promotional profitability or the profitability of plan which involves assessing your actual spend vs. plan, actual revenue vs. plan, volume vs. plan and determining the profitability of the various promotion drivers. 

Implement in as little as 8 weeks

The SAP HANA Customer Engagement Intelligence rapid-deployment solution includes Customer Value Intelligence, Audience Discovery and Targeting and Account Intelligence. This enables customers to maximize revenue and margin and provide decision assistance to sales and marketing across customers, products, and channels. In addition, it offers high volume, real time, predictive segmentation of millions of customers.

Implement in as little as 13 weeks

Commodity Risk Analytics

SAP Commodity Risk Analytics rapid-deployment solution provides your organization with instant visibility into commodity risk-related information across multiple lines of business. This enables your business to address commodity position risks at all levels, and across all geographic regions with global dashboardsAnalyze total commodity exposures and the financial derivatives thereof.  Detail commodity positions hierarchically by time period and location.  Enable anytime, anywhere visibility via integration with mobile devices.

Implement in as little as 10 weeks

Enterprise Asset Management

SAP Condition-Based Maintenance rapid-deployment solution enables your organization to perform maintenance only when necessary by arming maintenance teams with sophisticated intelligence and comprehensive asset health dashboards, also minimizing the risks of catastrophic asset failure. The solution enables manual and automatic triggering of maintenance workflow via native integration with the SAP Enterprise Asset Management (SAP EAM) solution.  Implement a truly condition-based maintenance strategy based on real-time assessment of assets and equipment conditions obtained from embedded sensors and external tests and measurements. 

Implement in as little as 7 weeks

SAP Asset Analytics rapid-deployment solution empowers you to gain visibility into the operation of physical assets, take proactive steps to avoid interruptions and downtime, effectively forecast and plan to maximize asset utilization, and optimize asset performance to compete in the marketplace. 

Implement in as little as 13 weeks

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      2 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Andreas Muno
      Andreas Muno

      Hi Robert,

      you may also want to consider:

      • the SAP Mobile Analytics rapid-deployment solution; it caters to SAP analytics customers, deploying MOBI, (a.k.a. SAP BusinessObjects Mobile Business Intelligence) and educating customer's BI experts, how to transform existing reports for consumption on mobile form factors. It also caters to SAP customers who implemented the SAP Mobile Platform, and would like to create their own mobile dashboards, or mobile apps with embedded analytics, for insight to action at the point of of action out in the field. Customers with the Mobile Platform and SAP HANA can benefit even more.
        Implement in as little as 3 weeks.
      • the SAP Work Manager rapid-deployment solution, for SAP EAM customers, to complement SAP Condition-Based Maintenance rapid-deployment solution and SAP Asset Analytics rapid-deployment solution. Asset maintenance is streamlined and cuts down efforts in the field as well as in the back office tremendously with the mobile work mananger app. Field data are captured more accurately, and field workers get all the data they need throughout their shift more timely. Their productivity increases, and the enterprise becomes more competitive.
        Implement in as little as 5 weeks.
      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member
      Blog Post Author

      Good point, Andreas!  I highlighted only a few of the solutions in the analytics portfolio, out of the 150+ as of this writing, across virtually every line of business and industry.  These are great solutions to support Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) as well as mobile analytics in general.

      Most of the analytics solutions can already leverage mobile-ready SAP BusinessObjects visualization tools, even if that support isn't a formal part of the pre-defined scope (in many cases, it is).  That step often requires very little additional work, assuming the mobile infrastructure is in place.

      We'll also see more assemble-to-order (A2O) approaches from both the design and delivery perspective, where pre-assembled building blocks can be put together in any way to meet a customer's business needs.   I hope to cover this concept in more detail in a future article.