C4C Analytics 101 – Designing Reports

The following are some of the soundbytes from the coversation that I had the distinct pleasure of engaging in with Sebastine Augustine who is working on redefining the state of business analysis that supports the Cloud for Customer solution offering at SAP. Please check out the associated video to get to all the details that Sebastine discussed about the analytics framework that is part of the Cloud for Customer solution offering.

The most common questions seem to be around design reports and design data sources, so let’s probably take a quick look at the design reports section.  Now again, as I mentioned, this is for an operations use, so you are primarily administering reports by creating nuances, changing the existing ones, assigning them to users and hiding some reports which are not relevant as such.

The creation of a report is pretty much a simple process.  You would just go – if you have to take on a new report as such and then you have a seven-step process where you would, first, select a data source.  A data source is effectively the business object or the view that you will want to use to create your report on.

Key figures are nothing but measures.  Characteristics are dimensions which, in lay man’s term could be just actual values as characteristic.  And the numerical or amount or quantity are referred to as key figures as such.

If you have created your own figure, it will be under the group “Customer Created Key Figures” and you can very easily just pick up those and use them in your report.  Once you’ve selected the key figures, these are all the numeric values.  You can choose the dimensional values which are mainly the texts that characterize the number.

When the report definition is done, but you would need to do two steps before the report is available for the end user.

The first step is to assign the report.

And the second step that you’ll have to do is create a view for the report so that you are able to decide what should be the structure in which the data in this report should be displayed.

That was about designing reports.

It then comes to designing data sources, very often the next step that administrator tend to get to, where you want to bring together diverse data sources.

The administration guide available on the service marketplace also provides information on how to work with reports including how to add data sources, how to create key figures and so on.  It is useful to go over this information whenever an end user gets stuck with creating a report or if they are not sure about what one of the steps in the wizard in the report creation or the data that will be displayed in the report.

Talk to us via comments and give us feedback about the content.

You can reach Sebastine on Twitter @sebastinea and on the SCN Community @ Sebastine Augustine

You can reach me on Twitter @pushkar_atSAP and on the SCN Community @ Pushkar Ranjan