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Why S/4HANA Embedded Analytics means faster operational decisions?

SOA People |

Part of SAP S/4HANA, Embedded Analytics enables you to perform analytics on live transactional data. It gives you quick operational access to day-to-day decision making and has a modern look and feel thanks to SAP Fiori with all its security and self-service enabled access.

What makes Embedded Analytics different?

Embedded in ERP it previously took a lot more effort to produce reporting and analysis for your shorter term operational decisions. With SAP S/4HANA it’s now much quicker to make those day-to-day decisions based on your live data – maybe you need to find out what size customer discount can you give or what is your current stock level on a given product and so on.

Of course you still need your Business Intelligence for higher level management reporting, which gives you a dashboard where you can get KPIs, predictive analysis, big data and all the information that you need for your Business Intelligence. But Analytics should form part of your overall reporting framework that serves to support your daily activity for shorter term operational views.

How can you get Embedded Analytics into the hands of your key operational users faster?

To sell the products you have in your warehouse you need to know how many you have; an operational report would show you the amount. To do this your data needs to be accurate and real-time and this is one of the characteristics of Embedded Analytics.

But getting the right users in your organisation to benefit from it this means making the screens easy, accessible and intuitive with decisions possible within a few clicks. They need to be able to jump right in, secure that the figures that come out are accurate and up to the minute. This is where SAP Fiori apps come in. Fiori apps can be easily customised to fit the environment they are being used in and give users the latest UI.

Visualisation of data with SAP S/4HANA

With SAP S/4HANA there is no replication of data; it is real-time and available with Core Data Services (CDS) views in BW because you’re using HANA platform that both systems (S/4HANA and BW on HANA) run on.  You are effectively virtualizing your data directly from source. This means the moment you need your data it comes straight to you in S/4HANA, reducing your data footprint and costs as well as simplifying your data modelling infrastructure in BW on HANA.

What if you’re not yet ready for SAP S/4HANA?

There are benefits to both S/4HANA and BW HANA, as they both bring two different elements to the table for Analytics.  Embedded Analytics comes with S/4HANA and can be introduced at the time you are ready for it.  Meanwhile you can study the operational reports which exist in BW and slowly transform them into your Embedded Analytics on the S/4HANA environment.  Upgrading the Netweaver platform to the S/4HANA environment will have very little impact on the existing replication infrastructure to SAP BW.

Take homes:

  • Embedded Analytics has a direct impact on a range of users at different levels: operational users, key users, and IT professionals
  • It shifts the balance between the traditional marriage of ECC (S/4HANA) and BW (BW/4HANA)
  • Rapid decision making is possible because of Fiori Apps which can be customized easily
  • Operational reporting will move to ECC and will be discharged from BW, impacting the need to change\customize the CDS view in S/4HANA
  • There are possibilities to extend or customize the CDS of S/4HANA for IT professionals, which can be used in other applications\reports.
  • Virtualization of data to BW makes real-time data available with CDS-views in BW on HANA if there is a need for it.

To find out how to make your operational data work harder for you and get it to the right people in your organisation faster, get in touch with SOA People.

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