Please check also on in the same note, what is planned for SAC BW live connection in the future. One of the strongest integration is the planned datapoint commenting for SAP BW & SAP BPC live connection, where you can comment in SAC and in Analysis Office and both solutions will show your comments. But also other great features are part of a strong roadmap for SAP BW customers.
Blog series content (Part 3)
Please note that this is "Part 3" of my blog series. I strongly recommend that you read "Part 1" and "Part 2" first, before you continue with this blog, because they show some basics about SAP Analytics Cloud and the live connection to SAP BW itself. In addition it shows already a some great features you should see and know.
Part 1: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/01/08/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 2: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/03/10/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 3: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/11/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 4: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/11/24/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 5: will be available soon.
Part 6: not started!
Note: I have included several videos. You can run them directly in the blog and maximize them if needed. Please note as well, that there is no sound in the videos. The content speaks for itself 🙂
Now let's start with "Part 3"
Agenda
- Introduction & Repetition
- Custom Hierarchies/Groups for SAP BW Live and what about "Others"?
- YoY Performance Analysis based on SAP BW Query live content in SAC
- User-defined hierarchies with custom shape files in the geo choropleth layer
- What about Version mapping (e.g. with value type from SAP BW) and create variances on-the-fly using your SAP BW query data in live mode
- Using a hyperlink to jump to a source - e.g. to a SAP S/4HANA transaction
- Use Bookmarks to save the state of your story
- Using In-Cell Charts on characteristic structures (if you have a SAP BW query with 2 structures)
- How to easily enable your SAP BW Query to be available for Search to Insight
- SAP Analytics Cloud - Live Access to SAP BW/4HANA in 2020 - Special Demo video with many features from Blog Part 1 to 3.
Introduction & Repetition
SAP Analytics Cloud's innovative technology supports all levels of decision making. Built for the cloud / Built for business / Built for You!
With SAP's unique live access - e.g. to SAP BW/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA, SAP HANA, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud - you can access your corporate data seamlessly and easily by leveraging many great features provided by SAP Analytics Cloud.
The live access is one of the many highlights provided by SAP Analytics Cloud:
In Part 1 and Part 2 I have presented some great features and the feedback was great. Now it's time that I will present some more features.
Custom Hierarchies/Groups for SAP BW Live and what about "Others"?
In the last blog I have presented the option to build "custom groups". Just a short wrap-up. Story designers want to organize members of different dimension groups. When working on a story, you can define custom hierarchies on BW dimensions. These hierarchies can be used in charts, tables, input controls, and filters. You saw how this works if you followed the last blogs. But there is another interesting case for using this feature. Imagine that you know your Top products and you put them in a known structure. But some products needs to be combined in a separate folder which you want to call “others”. And this is possible by using the custom grouping feature.
Let's have a look into how this would look like and please note that this is again a nice features which shows what you can do on top of SAP BW with SAC without "touching & changing" the SAP BW Query.
YoY Performance Analysis based on SAP BW Query live content in SAC
There are different ways to create a YoY performance chart based on SAP BW data. One possible way would be to create a SAP BW query with 2 structures. As usual you can create your characteristic structure with the time restrictions/selections and then you can also make use of the cell editor for some special requests like cumulations or whatever you want to achieve. There are lots of possibilities to do great stuff without programming.
Here you can see an example how the cell editor in the SAP BW Query would look like.
And this can be easily consumed 1:1 by SAP Analytics Cloud.
So far so good. But is there another way? And what about the possibility to compare different years?
Well, there are different options (on SAP BW side and SAC side). You can create your restricted Measures in SAC, again without touching the SAP BW query. But there is a really easy way you can use as well. Just check if the SAP BW characteristic 0CALMONTH2 is part of your data provider. In most cases it is available as time characteristic. If not, please contact your SAP BW team and ask if they can add it.
But what is the difference to the characteristic 0CALMONTH which is available in many SAP BW queries already? That’s easy – just look at the examples:
Calendar Year/Month - 0CALMONTH - 200702 { February 200 }
Calendar month - 0CALMONTH2 - 02
So 0CALMONTH2 is just the “month” value (or description). Just add it to your SAP BW query in the free characteristics area and you are ready:
In SAP Analytics Cloud it will become available in your model (you remember we have a live connection so the model is getting anything automatically from SAP BW). And now you can just add your measures in the columns and the month dimension (based on 0CALMONTH2 from the SAP BW Query) in the rows. In addition you add the calendar year to the color and that’s it. We have our YoY comparison and you can compare whatever you want 🙂
Let’s see how this would look like in SAP Analytics Cloud. You will first see the example with 0CALMONTH2 in the rows and I will also show shortly the result I mentioned above with the SAP BW Query using 2 structures.
User-defined hierarchies with custom shape files in the geo choropleth layer
There are several possibilities to visualize data based on a SAP BW query live connection in SAP Analytics Cloud. And is was already possible to use Geo maps in SAC based on SAP BW Query data. For further details please check the SAP Analytics Cloud help or the following SAP Wiki page: https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Live+-+Geo+Map
With Q2.2020 you can now consume user-defined hierarchies with custom shape files in the geo choropleth layer. It allows you to drill down to a specific level. For example, you can access level two with one click.
Please have a look into the SAP Analytics Cloud help for details if you want to learn more about this feature: https://help.sap.com/viewer/00f68c2e08b941f081002fd3691d86a7/release/en-US/a57f825d94ac49a6bfb6bb0da...
Let's see how this would look like in SAP Analytics Cloud.
What about Version mapping (e.g. with value type from SAP BW)
From SAC planning models you know, that there are different categories — money you actually made (Actual), money you’re going to make (Forecast), and money you are going to spend (Budget). SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to choose the granularity of each of these categories. And exactly this is also possible if you have the version or the value type in your SAP BW query. You can manually map the characteristic values coming from the SAP BW query – e.g. from the value type to the corresponding dimension values in SAP. This is one of the tasks you can perform directly in the SAP Analytics Cloud model.
This will open the door for some nice features you can use within SAP Analytics Cloud - e.g. Actual vs Budget comparisons, Variances incl IBCS.
https://youtu.be/8KHJdmnDs-E
Just try this on your own and look what else can be done with the version when accessing a SAP BW Query live with SAP Analytics Cloud.
Using a hyperlink to jump to a source - e.g. to a SAP S/4HANA transaction
This is now something which is not depended from a live connectivity. But as its a cool feature I think you need to see and know this. Imagine you have a report based on SAP BW or SAP S/4HANA. You see your sales orders with the relevant KPI's. Now it would be really cool, if you can jump to the transaction with the relevant details. An exactly this can be achieved.
In SAP Analytics Cloud you can create hyperlinks easily via the context menu and can jump from one story to another or to another tab - including filters. But this is also working with external links which can be generic if you add dynamically dimension values to the link by leveraging the embedded API. This is a powerful feature (like many other cool SAP Analytics Cloud features 🙂 ) and will make your end users lucky.
Just add a hyperlink in SAC where you need it via right click or context menu, prepare your link and copy it in the relevant place in SAC, select a dimension at the right point to parametrize the target application (e.g. to send the Sales Order ID to the S/4HANA system) and now you can make use of it. SAP Analytics Cloud will now allow you to jump from any part of the chart to the “jump” target of your link (e.g. a SAP S/4HANA transaction).
Now let’s have a look into a short video how this will look like.
https://youtu.be/kK5Ynzu4ndQ
Use Bookmarks to save the state of your story
Using bookmarks in SAP Analytics Cloud allows you easy and quick access to frequently used scenarios. And they work also with content which is based on a live connectivity. With this feature, you can save the state of prompts, input controls, tables and tables and revert to them when needed. In SAP Analytics Cloud you can to switch between multiple scenarios with easily by letting you create multiple bookmarks
https://youtu.be/GaSp9vLPHbA
Using In-Cell Charts on characteristic structures (if you have a SAP BW query with 2 structures)
You can have numeric values and incell-charts within table cells. That feature was available already in SAP Analytics Cloud. Initially it was only working with measures. So if you have used a SAP BW Query as source, you were able to activate in-cell charts for your measures (key figure structure members) in SAP Analytics Cloud. Even if you have used a SAP BW Query with 2 structures as source for your SAP Analytics Cloud model, it was only available for the Key Figure structure.
Many SAP BW customers requested to have this feature for their characteristic structure as well, if they use a SAP BW Query with 2 structures as source for their SAP Analytics Cloud model. And with wave Q2.2020 we delivered this feature. And while we did this, we also enabled thresholds for characteristic structures as well 🙂
Let's have a look into a video.
https://youtu.be/5eIWuIQY-x4
Using SAP Analytics Cloud Search to Insight with your SAP BW live data
Search to Insight is a natural language query interface used to query data.
While working with indexed models based on acquired and SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP BW live data, you can query Search to Insight to get quick answers to questions and incorporate these insights into a story.
You can ask questions such as:
- Sales for a specified year or quarter.
- Sales for a region or two regions by priority.
- Compare Actuals versus Forecasted values for a specified measure in a specific time period.
The Search to Insight interface can identify and auto-complete intended dimension names, dimension values, and measure names with assisted recognition to display accurate results.
In an SAC live model you need to create an index before you can use this model in Seaech to Insights. This function can be found in the model preferences.
As I have received some questions about this topic in my last blog, I decided to show you the indexing process in the model and how it look like in SAP Analytics Cloud if you search for information.
You can also query models based on live data (SAP HANA, SAP BW, SAP S/4 HANA) when working with Search to Insight on iPhone. Yes - now you can enjoy the benefits of our conversational artificial intelligence to visualize and analyze live data on your iPhone.
Please have a look on the SAP Analytics Cloud page in the product update area what has been delivered in the different waves around the Search to Insight feature: https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product_updates/release-q2-2020/
Now let's have a look into the video. You will first see the indexing process in the model and then I will switch to the SAP Analytics Cloud demo you already know from the different videos to see how this will work.
https://youtu.be/AHd6Y4oOAMI
SAP Analytics Cloud - Live Access to SAP BW/4HANA in 2020 -
Special Demo video YOU MUST SEE with many features from Blog Part 1 to 3 🙂
As a special I have created a video, where you can see all the great features from the 3 blogs in ONE video. Some of the content looks a little bit different because I have changed some visualizations. Have fun watching it.
- SAP Analytics Cloud Home Screen
- SAP Analytics Cloud Catalog
- BW Query access with variable popup
- Linked Analysis
- Dimension & Measure Input Controls with SAP BW BW Characteristics & Key Figures
- Time Series Forecasting on live SAP BW Query data
- Gauges with R on selected BW Query Key Figures
- Geo Map with custom shape and drill down to regions - based on SAP BW Query data
- Images based on SAP BW XXL attributes
- Working with SAP BW Hierarchies with drill down
- Live data blending of two SAP BW queries
- SAP BW Queries with 2 structures - Plug & Play
- Custom Sorting
- Custom Grouping
- Slice & Dice on your SAP BW Query data - Live without a SAC model in the Data Analyzer
- PowerPoint Export
- Publishing & Scheduling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqQaUoWrc2o
These were again a few examples and there are of course many more possibilities with SAP Analytics Cloud on SAP BW on HANA or SAP BW/4HANA. To learn more, please have a look into our strong roadmap in the Roadmap Explorer for SAC and check our SAP Analytics Cloud product page for more information’s & details.
As mentioned in the introduction, I plan a few SAC blogs. This one was the fourth 🙂
Part 1: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/01/08/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 2: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/03/10/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 3: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/11/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 4: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/11/24/analyse-your-data-live-with-sap-analytics-cloud-on-sap-bw-on-hana-s...
Part 5: will be available soon.
Part 6: not started!
I hope you enjoyed part 3 of the blog series. I have some ideas which will be part of "Part 4" 😉
Stay safe and have a good day.
Cheers
Adem
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