Welcome to the world of analytics – where data becomes insights and decision-making becomes more informed. Analytics is the process of using data to gain insights and make informed decisions. In today’s data-driven world, analytics is becoming increasingly essential for businesses of all sizes and industries. In this article, we will explore the basics of analytics and its importance in the modern business landscape.

What is Analytics?

Analytics is the process of collecting, storing, and analyzing data to identify patterns, relationships, and trends that can inform decision-making. Analytics can help businesses uncover insights that they might not have otherwise seen, and make data-driven decisions that are based on facts and figures rather than gut feelings or intuition.

Types of Analytics

There are several types of analytics, including:

– Descriptive analytics: This type of analytics describes what has happened in the past. It involves collecting and analyzing historical data to identify patterns and trends.
– Diagnostic analytics: This type of analytics explains why something happened. It involves analyzing data to understand the root cause of a problem or opportunity.
– Predictive analytics: This type of analytics predicts what will happen in the future. It involves using statistical models and machine learning algorithms to forecast future trends and behaviors.
– Prescriptive analytics: This type of analytics recommends what actions to take. It involves using data and models to identify the best course of action to achieve a specific goal.

Importance of Analytics

Analytics can be applied in various industries, such as finance, healthcare, marketing, and sports. It can help businesses improve their efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenue. Analytics allows businesses to:

– Gain insights: Analytics provides businesses with insights that they might not have otherwise seen, which can help them make informed decisions.
– Identify opportunities: Analytics can help businesses identify new opportunities that they might not have otherwise seen, such as new markets or products.
– Make data-driven decisions: By using analytics, businesses can make data-driven decisions that are based on facts and figures rather than gut feelings or intuition.
– Improve efficiency: Analytics can help businesses identify areas where they can improve their efficiency and reduce costs.
– Increase revenue: By identifying new opportunities and making data-driven decisions, businesses can increase revenue and gain a competitive advantage in their industry.

Conclusion

In conclusion, analytics is a powerful tool that can help businesses make data-driven decisions and gain a competitive advantage in their industry. By leveraging analytics, organizations can gain insights, identify opportunities, and make informed decisions that improve their performance. If you’re interested in leveraging the power of analytics for your business, consider partnering with a team of experts who can help you collect, store, and analyze data effectively. Contact us today to learn more!

If you have an existing SAP BW or BW/4HANA on premise data warehouse, you are likely well aware that it didn’t just appear overnight fully loaded with data and analytics solutions but rather was developed with lots of thought, care, and attention.  With the advent of all things cloud, including data warehouses, what does it mean to all the accretive knowledge, business logic, and code that is encompassed in our existing solutions?

With the marketing and media attention on the cloud, we are bombarded with all the benefits that a cloud solution can bring.   SAP has delivered a top-notch, long-term cloud data warehouse and analytics solution set in SAP Datasphere (SAP DSP) and SAP Analytics Cloud (SAP SAC).  This solution set provides a business focused, innovative, and fully cloud based BI solution.  SAP DWC is the strategic, target solution for all data warehouse uses in SAPs statement of direction. And while that all sounds like a wonderful panacea, it can be a bit daunting to think about how to get from point a (our on-prem solution) to point b (a cloud DW solution).

The Bridge Concept

Fortunately, SAP has come up with a practical and innovative solution to make it much easier for their customers to start their cloud journey to the SAP DSP solution:  the SAP DSP Bridge.   At the heart of it, the bridge is a tool that customers can leverage to 1) move at their own pace to the cloud and 2) at the same time leverage their existing BW base in the cloud quickly.

There are some key guiding principles that the SAP DSP Bridge solution embodies:

• Reuse. Reduce, reuse, recycle!  SAP has recognized that redoing work that has already been done is not a fan favorite.  After all, there was a lot of effort put into carefully crafting all the current SAP BW and SAP BW/4HANA data warehouses out there. 
• Connect to data sources with confidence and in a familiar manner.
• Innovate! Leverage the benefits of the cloud to innovate sooner rather than later with our existing SAP BW assets.

What the Bridge Does

The SAP BW Bridge transfers key elements of an existing BW environment into a custom space inside SAP DSP so departments can share access to critical data.  With SAP BW Bridge, key content, data, staging, customization and connectivity is transferred to a purpose-built space inside of data warehouse cloud, where it can now be leveraged by other data users as if it was any other data space inside of the DSP environment.

• Reuse, not rebuild data models, transformations; and customizations to protect investments
• Accelerate time-to-value with 70-80% reuse of existing BW artifacts with transfer tools
• Capitalize on your existing expertise with access to a familiar modeling and development environment

Unlike other cloud solutions, this preserves the use of most customizations and custom data objects from BW.

What the Bridge Enables

Once the bridge to the DSP is enabled for your BW solution, you gain new abilities to work with your data assets including:

• Retain familiar connectivity to SAP data and semantics efficiently with ABAP-level extractors, staging area and understanding of SAP data and relationships 
• Extend your data reach easily to new data sources and take advantage of the Data Marketplace to combine SAP and external data for broader insights
• Connect data efficiently across clouds and hybrid landscapes without unnecessary data movement – unmatched data virtualization across multiple clouds

This makes it easier to transition your workflows to leverage the power of new technologies such as SAP’s upcoming Data Marketplace.

To summarize, SAP BW Bridge allows you to retain much of the power of your original BW environment inside SAP DSP quickly.  You can start reaping the benefits of the DSP cloud platform even before fully migrating to it.  The bridge tool allows you to chart your own journey and timeline to migrate to the cloud without forcing you into a big bang cutover.

This tool will help us all in our mission to breakdown business silos and empower users with the latest information, all running on the proven HANA database management system, designed specifically to take on today’s most challenging, multi-model analytics problems. 

With SAP BW Bridge, you gain the power of bringing your systems together as part of SAP’s Business Technology Platform. This powerful platform was engineered by SAP not only to meet the critical needs of today’s processing but to grow with you to meet your business’s challenges for years to come. 

If you’d like to know more or would like a bit of help charting your journey with the SAP BW Bridge and SAP DSP, we’d love to help.  Contact us using the form below.

– By Merri Beckfield

Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling your data to get it under control

Many of us have heard the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” for many years.  When hearing that phrase, it conjures up images of plastic water bottles, milk jugs, and soda cans.   Have you ever stopped to think of how these three words could be applied to the never-ending flood of data sources in our organizations? 

As many of us can attest, our data houses are becoming messy, and the stuff is piling up.   Our teams are getting overwhelmed in trying to deal with the deluge.  The refrains of “we have the data, but we can’t find it” Or “It is like looking for a needle in a haystack” are becoming all too common.

According to a recent report by Seagate¹, they project a 42.2% annual growth rate of enterprise data over the next two years.  The data deluge is an issue for organizations today that threatens to become a serious risk in the future if not addressed.  Our data houses are chaotic, and it is difficult to know where to start to get it under control.

Here is where concepts borrowed from recycling can help:

• Recycle – Recycle the tried-and-true techniques for organizing and managing work.  Dealing with data, while considered a bit esoteric, is just another type of work.  Get the work identified, prioritized (or de-prioritized if appropriate), and scheduled on a roadmap. 
  
  
• Reduce – Reduce the amount of data sources used in your organization. Not all sources are created equal. Identify which sources are both relevant and reliable.  Eliminate the clutter and noise from the others.
  
  
• Reuse – Investigate methods to share data knowledge. It is amazing how something as simple as a bi-weekly “birds-of-a-feather” sharing session across the key analysts in the organization can help with this.  Promote collaboration and sharing amongst the data analysts in your organization.  A bit of time invested up-front can pay off big-time in reduced rework.

If you’d like help in taming the data deluge, we can help.  Our resources have techniques that can assist you in Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling your data to get it under control.  Contact TEK – Tek Digital Transformations (tek-analytics.com)

¹ Rethink Data | Seagate US

– By Merri Beckfield

SAP Analytics Cloud is introducing one of the most asked features on Scheduling Stories and Analytical Applications with its latest update 2020.03.

We call it as Schedule Publications. With this, you would be able to Schedule a Story and also an analytical application with recurrence and distribute the same as a PDF over email to a number of different SAC and Non-SAC recipients. And do much more things like, you can even include a customized message in the email per the schedule and attach a link as well to the view of the story in online mode which can be used to check the latest online copy of the story / analytical applications.

Note: Schedule publications would be available only for SAP Analytics cloud Tenants based on the AWS data center (Cloud foundry based).

You can create a single schedule or even a recurring one with a defined frequency like hourly, daily, weekly.

Let’s get started:

At first, Schedule Publications needs to be enabled by your organization SAP Analytics cloud admin on the Tenant level. To do the same, please log in as Admin and go to System -> Administration and enable the Toggle as shown below.

“Allow Schedule Publications” and “Allow Schedule Publication to non-SAC users”

If you want to allow your schedules to be sent over to Non-SAC users as well along with SAC users, Please enable the toggle option as shown below.

Schedule Publications is not by default enabled   to all users in your organization, your admin needs to assign to a template who would have rights for creating schedules.  To do the same. under the SAC Tenant application menu. Go under the Security -> Roles and click on any existing role where you would like to add Schedule Publications right.

How to create Schedule Publications?

You can create a schedule IF

• If you are a BI Admin or an Admin. By default, these roles come with the Schedule Publication permission.
• If the Schedule Publication permission has been assigned to a custom role created.
• If you have a Save or Save As permission to a story once the Schedule Publication permission is given.

Once a user has been granted access to create schedules

• Select the Story / Analytical application under the browse files (By using the checkmark) and then choose the option Share  -> Schedule Publications as shown below or

• The other way is to open a Story and the again go under share option and select Schedule Publication.

• Once the Schedule Publications Dialog box opens, Input the details as required.

Name: Provide a name for your Schedule

Start:  Provide a start date for your schedule with a defined time or you can add recurrence

details as well by selecting the option “Add Recurrence”.

Under Recurrence, you can define the recurrence pattern to be hourly, daily, weekly as different options and also the number of times needs to be repeated including the end of occurrence details.

Topic: This is the subject for the email which would be delivered to the recipients

Message: This is the body of the message for the email which would be sent to the recipients over email.

Include Story Link:  If you select this checkmark, then the story/ analytics application link would be sent along with the email. If you happen to personalize the publication by selecting a bookmark to be delivered (Given below), then the personalized bookmark view link would be embedded.

Distribution: Here you can define the view of the story which needs to be delivered to the recipients. You can personalize different users or teams with different views of the same story to be delivered with the help of bookmarks available for stories. If your stories have multiple bookmarks where each of the bookmarks are relevant for different users/teams, you can make use of the same, else create one. The advantage you find with the bookmarks is you can create a unique personalized view by applying different filter options and create views. 

Distribution (Continued): You can create one or more than view (as story default view or different bookmarks) which can be delivered to different SAC users/teams. Let’s focus on one view and understand all options. Next to the Down-arrow, Double click “View1” and provide a name for your view. Below screenshot describes to be “Corona virus Clinical Characteristics Report”.

• SAP Analytics Cloud Recipients: Click the person icon and select the different SAC user recipients or teams
• Non-SAP Analytics Cloud Recipients: These are the users who are not a part of SAC user lists or a part of SAC tenant. You can include their email address by manually typing their addresses. Under the default SAC Analytics Cloud licensing, Per View, you can input a maximum of 3 Non-SAC Recipients.
• Story View: Choose the Story/Bookmarks view which you want to deliver to the above recipients. You can choose between Original Story, Global Bookmarks and as well My Bookmarks. the authorization on the story publication would be same as schedule owner and the exact view would be delivered to different recipients.
• File Name: Name of the publication which would be delivered to the recipients
• PDF Settings: You can select this option to define the PDF settings like what all pages you want to deliver, the grid settings for different columns and rows selection, choose to insert appendix which has details on metadata information on the story.

Once you are done with all the details then, Click OK and create your Schedule.

How to view my Schedules created and as well how can I Modify the Schedule?

You can view the Schedule created under the Calendar view. Go to the SAC application menu and select Calendar. You can see the schedule created right there.

If its recurrence schedule, then you would see against multiple different dates /time as defined by the schedule owner.

You can as well modify a single recurrence or the entire series occurrence. Select the occurrence from the calendar view and on your right side, a new panel opens where you can modify as shown below.

You can edit the Referrence Setting for Reference Pattern and End Reference by as interested and click on OK and click on Update to save the changes.

As and when the clock ticks it’s time, The Schedule publication picks the job and creates the publications and send it to the different recipients defined as an attachment over email. The maximum mail delivery size allowed per email including attachment is 15MB.

Schedule Publications in itself is a resource intensive tasks which includes the Schedule publications engine on the cloud hosted on SAP Analytics Cloud do a variety of jobs in the background for creating the publications including the email delivery. Out of the box with the standard licensing you would get limited number of schedules.