Business Trends
Embedded Analytics: A Decision-Making Revival for SAP Customers and Partners
Analytics is increasingly gaining existential prominence across all industries. Now more than ever, people are no longer willing to accept emotion-driven opinions and intuition that guide less-than-optimal decisions. We want real-time data and insights, tempered by ethical judgment, human experiences, intellectual wisdom, and, above all, compassion and empathy.
Such demand for trusted information is compelling businesses to seek technologies that capture, process, and analyze effectively to improve decision-making. However, the conventional route of developing tools from scratch and supporting the back end has become too time-consuming, economically unsustainable, and technically daunting. And as new analytics capabilities are introduced, bringing users up to speed can be equally challenging.
Fortunately, trends in embedded analytics are beginning to take shape. Businesses are now taking insights beyond traditional dashboards and separate analytics tools. By managing data and running analytics in the background of the applications they use, users can streamline business activities, automate repetitive processes, and make better choices.
At the intersection of integration, intelligence, and interaction
At the center of every decision is a story – one created from the interactive exploration of data. This is the moment when insights are made, information is visualized through charts and tables, and findings are shared, presented, and discussed collaboratively.
This decision-making experience can become natural and seamless when enabled by embedded analytics integrated with business applications. Instead of pulling data from one source to a separate tool to run analytics with a degree of proficiency, users can evaluate data on the fly within the context of their work and share resulting insights with the right experts and colleagues.
Take, for example, the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. The embedded analytics solution allows our customers to customize the user experience of data stories, visualizations, and other reporting outputs to fit seamlessly into existing applications. Templates can be created for each unique story, matching the fonts and color palettes used in the target application.
Embedded analytics functionalities are not just easy to add to the application structure, but they also work as though they were part of the original design. Users can further personalize the interface with custom widgets that offer new visualizations using D3 and R-language scripts. Additionally, machine learning technology can be applied to highlight key business drivers and insights through predictive analytics.
Live connectivity to the application database is also a significant benefit. Immediate consistency of data for analytics means that users don’t have to wait for the database to update before analyzing it within the business application they are using. Moreover, the analytics are fully democratized to the point where users can copy, edit, and share stories directly in applications.
On the cusp of the future of decision-making
Trusted storytelling always depends on the quality of the data that defines it. This understanding has inspired SAP to go beyond embedding SAP Analytics Cloud into our own suite of applications. Now, we are bringing our customers and partners closer to this leading edge of next-generation decision-making – with greater ease and speed.
By offering SAP Analytics Cloud, embedded edition, we are enabling our customers and partners to seamlessly incorporate analytical capabilities into the business workflow of their end-user solutions, This latest edition provides an accurate 360-degree account of business challenges to help users make proactive decisions confidently and quickly based on insights derived out of the application database. The solution is a part of SAP’s Business Technology Platform, which includes intelligent technologies, database and data management, application development, and integration.
With innovations such as our latest edition of SAP Analytics Cloud, the advantage of using embedded analytics is clear. Although real-time reporting, dashboarding, and self-service discovery of data, as well as streamlined, end-to-end workflows, are still critical elements of decision-making, integrating these capabilities into the framework of a single solution experience turns every decision into a step forward no matter how uncertain our world may be.