Overview of Embedded Analytics for SAP Commissions

This blog post will give an overview of embedded edition of SAC for SAP Commissions. It is divided into following blocks of information.

1. What is SAP Analytics Cloud and What does Embedded Analytics for Commissions offer
2. Glossary of Terminologies
3. How to access Embedded Analytics in Commissions
4. Out-Of-The-Box Commissions Data Models
5. Out-Of-The-Box Stories
6. Videos of Custom Stories/Dashboards

1. SAP Analytics cloud (SAC) is a cloud offering from SAP which enables customer to make better decisions with all analytical capabilities in one solution. It helps in getting intelligence from data using business intelligence, enterprise planning and augmented analytics capabilities. One of the differentiating capabilities of SAC is that it seamlessly integrates AI technologies like Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Query (NLQ) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) to be usable by all.

SAC comes with 2 editions i.e. Embedded edition and Enterprise edition.

Embedded Analytics is provided across Intelligent enterprise applications like S4Hana, SuccessFactors, Customer Experience, Ariba, Fieldglass with no additional license or cost. It provides operational analytics with live connectivity to underlying data and allow users to take action within the context of application.

Embedded analytics for commissions provides a set of tools for customers to inspect data, discover insight and visualize information from sales performance and compensation data captured in sap commissions. It can help customers with following business values:

• Real-Time payment and performance insight
• Understand commission expense relative to sales/bookings
• Increased accuracy and transparency in compensation calculation from Credits to Payments
• Reduces risks by Analyzing and discovering compensation disputes and payment error

2. Glossary – Few terminologies relating to embedded analytics:

• Story – A report or Dashboard, collection of pages, containing charts, tables, texts, images with the state-of-the-art visualization features
• Model – A representation of the business data of an organization or business segment. It provides information about the data fields and its properties
• Dimension – Data fields which describes the measures e.g. Business Units, Participant, Region, Credit Type etc.
• Measures – Data fields which are quantitative in nature e.g. Payment Value, Bookings Revenue etc.
• Content Network – It enables customers to import, export and share packages of content from within SAP Analytics Cloud across systems.

3. Acces Embedded Analytics:

Embedded analytics is listed in the Portal Apps menu of Sales Performance Home provided user has required authorization.

Accessing Embedded Analytics from SPM Home

4. SAP Commissions Data models:

In embedded analytics stories, either real-time data or approved data can be used.

• Real-time data is based on the latest commissions pipeline run
• Approved Data is from the approved pipeline stage in commissions. This provides an additional control for administrators to make only approved pipeline stage data available to analytics users.

By default, real-time data is used in embedded analytics. To use approved data, “Approved Calculated Data” flag must be enabled by SAP Support team via a Ticket.

There are few data models given out of the box (details are below) and standard stories built using these models. You can also design Custom stories suitable to your needs based on these models.

1. Credits – contains results of crediting stage for each payee i.e. shows the details of credits received by payees.
2. Measurements – includes measurement details (primary and secondary) of each payee i
3. Incentives – contains the results of incentive rule calculations for each payee
4. Deposits – contains the result of deposit rules i.e. shows total commission earned for each payee in a period
5. Payments – tracks payment to the payee by period
6. Balances – enables analysis of the payment balances for each payee
7. Payee Transactions – enables analysis of transactions by payee. All generics for transaction, payee, and position are included.
8. Commissions – includes commissions whose incentives are calculated based on credits rather than measurements

There are two more models i.e. Transactions and Classified transactions which are designed for administrator use only. These two models should not be used in stories which are going to be shared with Payees.

5. Out of the Box Stories:

SAP provides 23 stories out of the box. Few of those are as below:

Bookings Trend

Product Transactions

Credit Details

Incentive Payee Distribution

Payment By Earning Code

Team Deposit Distribution

6. Custom Stories/Dashboards:

I have designed couple of Custom dashboards using above-mentioned standard models and short videos of the dashboards are as below.

Conclusion: You can use the standard models provided out of the box to create custom stories/dashboards as per your needs.

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