What’s New in SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital ...
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This blog post covers the new features and enhancements in SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom from the Q3 2021 Quarterly Release Cycle (QRC).
Please note that the SAP Analytics Cloud Help Portal is updated at the same time as the upgrade to this release, so the links here may not yet reflect what is described below until after the upgrade is complete.
Technical Requirements
Be sure to upgrade to the latest SAP Analytics Cloud agent version 1.0.329 to take advantage of all the data acquisition types. Here are the minimum data acquisition requirements:
Version 1.0.99 for SAP ERP/SQL Database
Version 1.0.91 for SAP Universe (UNX)
Version 1.0.233 for SAP Business Warehouse (BW)
Version 1.0.235 for SAP HANA View
Version 1.0.248 for File Server
Version 1.0.75 for all other data source types
SAP Analytics Cloud fully supports Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome for all activities and areas of viewing, authoring, and administration. For more information, review the following System Requirements and Technical Prerequisites.
Click on the listed links to learn more about each feature update in Q3 2021. Alternatively, check out this SAP Analytics Cloud Product Plan and watch the What’s New Video below for further information as well.
For Q3 2021, a new and improved user experience has been introduced to meet the needs of every user with a more consistent and seamless design. There are three main navigation improvements to streamline how you interact with SAP Analytics Cloud:
A simplified navigation sidebar that offers easier access to your applications with flexible display options so you can get the most out of your screen space. You can also right click to open the side navigation in a new browser tab.
A unified top shell bar that provides an easy-to-read breadcrumb navigation to keep you oriented throughout any part of your folder path. Likewise, there is a new actions menu with suggested shortcuts based on your opened file.
And a consistent content creation experience across your applications through single-entry start pages that allow you to browse through recent files and create new projects from a blank file or a template all in the same place.
You can now enable Optimized View Mode for live SAP HANA, HANA Cloud, Acquired Analytic, and Business Warehouse data models on a per story basis. This feature improves the usability for filters and widget interactions as well as the performance of dashboards in certain scenarios.
Active Viewport Rendering is the new default rendering behaviour in Optimized View Mode. Only objects that are visible on-screen will be rendered while all objects outside of the viewport will be paused until you modify the active viewport by scrolling in the dashboard. There are also many other performance and usability improvements such as the ghost loading indicator, tooltip experience, and your ability to undo or redo previous actions when interacting with stories.
For additional information on the Optimized Story Viewer experience, check out the following resources:
A new arrival to the Business Content Center in Q3 2021 is Operational Workforce Planning. This content package offers a highly customizable solution for your organization to drive agile financial, operational, and talent decisions amidst rapidly changing business conditions.
Operational Workforce Planning supports standard human resource planning for both top-down and bottom-up processes such as headcount and full-time equivalent (FTE) planning, position level planning, personnel cost planning, and contingent workforce planning.
And while Operational Workforce Planning is optimized for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4 HANA, it also has the ability to integrate with other extended planning and analysis content packages such as Integrated Financial Planning.
Augmented Analytics
Smart Predict/Predictive Planning
You can now implement automated time series techniques that mitigate disruption to business time series analyses caused by unpredictable external events. This feature keeps the planner aware of when disruptions are detected to enable more robust predictive forecasts and to optimize data-driven business decisions.
You can further refine your predictive forecasts by using the Influencers setting that allows you to select which influencer variables to include before training the predictive planning model. This feature improves the accuracy of predictive forecasts by selecting the most relevant influencer variables to include based on any known and unknown business conditions.
For more details and examples of these Smart Predict/Predictive Planning enhancements, check out the following resources:
Multi Actions is a new orchestration engine for operations related to multistep planning which delivers the ability to create complex workflows across multiple components. For this Q3 2021 release, you can run a sequence of data actions and version management steps on one or more models or versions.
In the Story or Analytic Designer, you can trigger the Multi Actions execution with one click. You can also set the value in the trigger and configure the styling of the trigger. This feature reduces the manual efforts on the administrator and end user, and the overall operational costs.
For additional information on Multi Actions, check out the following resources: