Addition of “Standard Analytics Capabilities” in SAP Asset Performancement Management 2305

We are excited to share that, as has been the case in SAP Predictive Asset Insights, as of the 2305 release we now have also added to SAP Asset Performance Management (APM) the capability to create embedded analytics dashboards using an integrated SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) system.

Before this release APM analytics capabilities focused on the ability to consume curated data from APM into a customer-owned SAP HANA system, there optionally enrich the data and create views on it, and then to consume that data in a customer-owned SAC system, there create SAC “models” and “stories”, and then in APM to link to such stories. We call that “custom analytics capabilities”, as the customer has the freedom to augment the APM data and build their own data views, and then use the full capabilities of an SAC Enterprise license to process and visualize the data.

In the new “standard analytics capabilities” the APM customer gets for each APM tenant, automatically and without additional cost, an embedded SAC tenant provided. That embedded tenant has fewer capabilities than SAC Enterprise; for example it does not allow to use the planning or machine learning functions. Also, it does not allow to augment the APM data. But for the purposes of “Business Intelligence” everything is there, from selecting which data tables and attributes and views to consume, how to display the data in various chart types, to filter the data, link tables, and even to build own calculated measures.

As of this release the following APM data objects are available for analytics (see also SAP Help for more details), additional ones are planned for future releases:

• Master Data
  • Technical Objects (equipment and functional locations)
  • Classes
  • Characteristics
  • Indicators
  • Indicator Thresholds
  • Alert Types
• Indicator Time Series Data
  • Hourly indicator value aggregates (min, max, sum, average, count)
• Transactional Data
  • Alerts
  • Notifications

The customer benefits of this new capability are:

• View linked data in one display, e.g. a count of alerts not just by alert details, but also by details of the technical object the alert was created for. Example: show the count of alerts for planning plants ABC and DEF, by the severity of the alert, for the previous month.
• View charts of data to get an easy-to-understand overview of data patterns and trends
• Filter selected data to focus on what is needed for a specific business process
• Speed up the deployment and use of APM analytics by getting the data and SAC capabilities automatically delivered, for free
• Make dashboard creation capabilities available to a broad set of users, due to the ease-of-use of the available Query Designer and Story Editor
• Real-time display of of analytics; apart from the indicator time series data, which has to be aggregated per each hour, all analytics dashboards show data as of the moment when the source data is created (e.g. a new alert, or a new notification).

To get started with the standard analytics capabilities, there is just one technical step a system administrator has to do, once, which is to establish “trust” between the APM and SAC system so that the APM users can automatically become SAC users. This function is a new entry in the APM Configuration Manager (there are five steps in total):

Analytics trust configuration screen

Once this is done, and the proper authorizations have been given to the business users, they can create new embedded analytics dashboards.

Firstly, the user would open the Analytics Dashboards application, and on the list of all dashboard select the action to create a new dashboard:

Create a new dashboard

APM will then display the SAC “Query Designer”, in which the user can see all available data sources, select one, select which attributes to display, also optionally including linked data sources, pre-filter the data, and more:

Query Designer screen

Selecting a data source

Selecting attributes

Once done, the user selects Finish and names the data source:

Naming the data source

The system then displays the SAC story editor, where the user can create charts, tables, and other objects. When e.g. selecting a chart …

Selecting a chart to be added to an SAC story

… the user configures the chart measures, dimensions, filters, etc. The screenshot here shows the available chart types:

Chart types

There are many more available functions, such as adding another data source, filtering the whole dashboard with different charts, etc.. But for the brevity of this blog entry the user then saves the dashboard and gives it a name:

Saving and naming a dashboard

The new dashboard will then appear in the list of all dashboards. It will be visible only to the author, until it is being published, and then all users can view it:

Publishing a dashboard

All other users can then open the dashboard and display it in view mode; only the author is able to switch to edit mode (like in the screenshot below):

Viewing a dashboard

For more information read the help pages at and under SAP Help.

And if you have any suggestions for how to improve APM Analytics Dashboards, please use the Asset Management influence site.

Happy dashboarding!