How to Level Up your SAP S/4HANA System with SAP Analytics Cloud

If you’re an SAP S/4HANA Customer, you’ll know that it provides Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) at its most intelligent. But what if you need more? More connectivity, more analytics, and a 360 degree view of your business? Consider how a cloud based, end-to-end solution like SAP Analytics Cloud can take your business to the next level. With seamless integration between SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud, you can take advantage of all of the benefits of cloud analytics, while connecting live to your SAP S/4HANA data.

Meet Sandra: Operations Manager and Avid SAP S/4HANA User

Let’s take Sandra, a highly motivated employee at Best Run Bikes who enjoys going for long bicycle rides in her spare time.  Sandra needs to create a report detailing predictions for bike inventory and revenue optimization, as well as report on any important insights that could help Best Run Bikes in the upcoming fiscal year. Unfortunately, Sandra has run into a few roadblocks:

• To create her report, Sandra needs data from many different places. She’s struggling to track down all the data, as well as finding it challenging to figure out how to merge it all together in a visually pleasing report.
• Sandra is on a tight deadline. It’s important that she has a 360 degree view of all of Best Run Bikes departmental KPIs across the entire business. This way, she can find the most useful insights possible, in the shortest amount of time.
• Finally, Sandra doesn’t have a lot of experience finding insights or creating predictive forecasts. She wants to make sure she is able to find relevant insights and creates accurate forecasts for Best Run Bikes.

SAP Analytics Cloud to the Rescue

Luckily, Sandra has decided to try the full version of SAP Analytics Cloud and take advantage of the live integration with SAP S/4HANA. To tackle her first problem, Sandra gets started connecting all of the data she will need to her SAP Analytics Cloud tenant. Now that it’s all in one place, it will be much easier to create the report, as well as be much quicker in the future. Additionally, because of the  live integration with S/4HANA any changes that might be made to the data will show up automatically in her dashboard.

To start analyzing her data, Sandra can take advantage of the vast content network that comes with SAP Analytics Cloud. These include templates for visualizations, stories, models and more. This way Sandra doesn’t need to create her entire report in an SAP Analytics Cloud story from scratch, a lot of the setup work is already done for her.

Once she has basic charts and tables ready to go, Sandra can use the many augmented analytics features in SAP Analytics Cloud to procure hidden insights and create forecasts. To create quick and easy forecasts, Sandra can use the in-chart forecasting feature to add predictions right into her Story’s charts. If she’s looking for something more robust, the SAP Analytics Cloud for planning feature Smart Predict provides simulations for time-series, regression, and classification predictive scenarios. Sandra can take advantage of predictive forecasting to test out different future scenarios when it comes to bike inventory planning, and choose the best scenario for revenue optimization.

SAP Analytics Cloud makes it extremely simple to get a clear overview of an entire organization all at once. Because Sandra is on such a tight deadline, it is important that she can see all the KPIs Best Run Bikes needs to hit in the upcoming year. This will inform how Sandra forecasts upcoming production quantities, hiring capacities and more. Additionally, since all department heads can access and use SAP Analytics Cloud, Sandra now has all the line of business information she needs in one place. SAP Analytics Cloud is now the single source of data truth for the whole organization, ensuring that the best decisions possible are made. Sandra can use this 360 degree view of Best Run Bikes to derive important insights that will benefit all different parts of the business.

Finally, to make sure Sandra finds any hidden insights, she can use other smart features like Smart Insights, or Search to Insight. Smart Insights makes it simple for Sandra to discover hidden drivers behind her data without having to slice and dice. Or, if Sandra thinks there might be some interesting insights but isn’t sure how to create a visualization to find out, she can use Search to Insight. For example, Sandra isn’t sure how to create a visual representation of the revenue numbers in each country of the new Super Sports Bike. To find out, she can just type “Show Revenue for Super Sports Bike by Country last year” and Search to Insight will know what she means using natural language processing.

By using SAP Analytics Cloud, Sandra is able to address all her challenges as well as set Best Run Bikes up for future success with the SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud integration.

Interested in seeing what SAP Analytics Cloud has to offer you and your company? Try it for free today!