Personal Insights

Yvonne Xu

December 29, 2022 4 minute read

Empower your year-end reporting with SAP Analytics Cloud

Introduction

As the year-end is approaching, I believe all of you must be anxious about your year-end report.

The year-end report is the summary and reflection of the year’s work results, and it is also the key moment to report the work achievements upwards. For such an important occasion, using data to speak has become a necessary skill for professional workplace! So, how to use data to speak?

In this article, let’s talk about how to use SAP Analytics Cloud to spice up your year-end report.

Why use data to tell a story?

In his book Energy Management, renowned psychologist Jim Lowe suggests that instead of managing time, it’s better to manage energy. Because people’s energy and attention throughout the day is something more limited than time, this is especially important for bosses who have a lot to do.

Therefore, to make your report impressive, you must make clever use of the expressive power of graphics and data.

In addition, for the year-end report will generally contain three soul questions: Were the goals set last year achieved? Was there outstanding growth this year? What are the plans for the coming year? All can be answered one by one with data.

As shown in Figure 1, we use the sales data of a fictitious company as a case study, and we can see that using data to tell a story can make the audience take in the information better than using words.

figure 1

Use different charts for different business scenarios

We can find many different chart types in the statistical charts of SAP Analytics Cloud Builder, each of which has different advantages.

figure 2

Here, we briefly recommend some charts for year-end reporting.

Line Chart

A line chart is a desirable choice when we talk about the performance and growth of the year. This is because the line chart can be used to describe the trend and direction of events.In the twists and turns of the line chart, we can find the growth points, turning points, a certain period or event in the year that led to the trend and direction of the performance.

In Figure 3, we can see that the line graph indicates that the recent sales are in an increasing upward trend.

figure3

Pie Charts

When we want to know what products sold the most during the year, we can use a pie chart, which can be used to break down the contribution in specific data, as in Figure 4, which depicts the percentage contribution of four products to sales.

figure 4

Histogram

Bar charts are used to describe the distribution and comparison of numbers, and can especially show the superiority of data at a certain node. Using a bar chart to describe one of your outstanding results often works well.

For example, in Figure 5, which depicts the sales performance of a virtual company in 2020, we can see that the company has outstanding sales performance in May.

figure 5

Map

Data involving regional distribution is most intuitive with maps. There are two main forms of data visualization charts for designing maps.

Use shades of color to show the size of the value of the regional range, such as showing the sales volume of each province and city, the distribution range of the market and other data.
Using anchor points to show the distribution of data in the region.

Figure 6 combines the above two forms, using gradient anchor points to indicate the size of the value range of each region.

figure 6

What if you don’t have an idea?

SAP Analytics Cloud Smart Discovery supports the automatic creation of your stories after importing data! Just ask a question about the data in the search box and you’ll instantly see visual answers that can be added to the data, and you can change the type of chart as needed! Easy to help year-end reporting ~

Summary

Through the introduction of this issue, I believe your guys must have a little inspiration for your year-end report. Practice makes perfect, so I hope you could kindly apply what you’ve learned to your dashboard design.

For more information, please follow the SAP Analysis Cloud topic page (SAP Analytics Cloud | SAP Community), post questions and answers (All Questions in SAP Analytics Cloud | SAP Community) and read other posts on the topic (SAP Analytics Cloud | SAP | SAP Blogs).

Thanks for reading my second blog post on community! For more information about dashboard design, please stay tuned to this channel for tweets. Also, I look forward to your feedback and comments in the comments.

See you in the next issue!

(All photos are made by auther. All rights reserved for the images used in this blog. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or for any purpose without the express permission of SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company.)

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