SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

I am a professional consultant and programmer and we are customers of SAP. 

This is a robust solution and I like that it's oriented to develop what we need in our ERP. I like the platform and the fact that it's the same ecosystem. 

There is something about SAP Analytics that is complicated and more technical, certainly in comparison to a solution like Power BI which is more intuitive and where it's easier to find data. Power BI has the added advantage that many people work with Excel. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

It's stable because it's all in the cloud. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't really tested it. Deployment requires a couple of people; one for design and the other working with what you need for analysis.

SAP calls me once every three to six months to ask how things are going. 

The initial setup is very easy because you can work with data models and if you know the database and you know how to model, both are intuitive. I haven't had many issues with deployment. 

In general Power BI seems to be more professional and user-friendly, it's certainly easier to find data. I prefer Power BI if I want to work quickly with clients because it's easier to use and I can send a link whereas SAP is more difficult to access and I can never be sure that the client can get access. The first steps are more or less the same with both products although SAP Analytics has perhaps more details to analyze what you see on the screen and Power BI has more of a classical interface.

Take your time and study the product because when you use SAP Analytics Cloud, you'll find it's very easy to make graphs and tables, to analyze and cross data. It's important to understand how it works but to also have a very clear idea of where you're going. There are online courses available as well as online help which is very useful. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

The version was launched about a month ago. We are in partnership with SAP, we're gold members. We implement SAP a lot. Working with open-source data in terms of Google Drive. 

The primary use case is working with open-source data in terms of Google Drive and other platforms. The environment currently runs on SAP, so SAP Analytics Cloud is a good way to go. The client can get value for money, instead of having to bring Oracle into an environment in which the integration might be clumsy. It makes sense to have SAP on the ground because they are running currently on HANA, which is why SAP was the first option on the list.

I love a lot of things about the product. The first is Smart Discovery and Smart Insight. It's amazing having predictive analysis and AI algorithms. A second valuable feature about SAP Analytics Cloud is the fact that it integrates with third-party applications such as Google Drive and Excel, which is amazing. Also the look and feel of the product, the user experience is very, very intuitive and the collaborative support that you have within the solution means you can share pictures, make comments, etc. It's very collaborative.

Improvement could be made in the pricing of the product which is very expensive, more than Oracle and Power BI and similar solutions. Currently, only one data modeler can work at a time. If you're working on a project and you have five data modelers, for example, if person A corrects or makes a change, person B won't see it. It makes it difficult because if you have three or four modelers working on the project, everybody should be able to work seamlessly without having to disturb one another. That's my only negative about SAP Analytics.

In the next release, I think they need to have voice-driven analytics, rather than just clicking and texting as it is now. A voice to text solution would make it funkier and more amazing. A move to include Android mobile platforms, would also be good, currently, it only works with iPhones and other Apple products. The number of people using Android is huge, so if they can extend the mobile platform to Android it'll be great. 

I've been using the product for about seven months. 

Though it is a relatively new solution, it is stable. 

I've been in touch with technical support because SAP has a presence in Nigeria. We can also get support from South Africa, and that was really helpful. 

I think deployment took us about a month and I think that was because this was very, very robust. Once you're able to get the data models it's just a matter of uploading.

The client actually wanted SAP. We checked other vendors to see if they could match what SAP could offer.

The program runs on the cloud. We push the data from the source offline entirely in the cloud, and the cloud takes over the analytics. It's a bit of a hybrid solution for now but we are thinking of moving fully into the cloud so that everything just happens in the cloud, and we get our insights and our KPIs displayed on the dashboard.

There can always be improvements and updates are coming in regularly but if you can afford this solution I would say 'go for it!' 

For now, I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

The solution is used for planning and budgeting.

The SKU, the story build all are user- friendly. For the story build one just has to drag and drop it. And for the table, you just need some sort of selections and everything there.

There is plenty of room for improvement. They have different products, and you need to integrate all of them to have one functionality. For example, data extraction happens in Datasphere. Then it would be best if you had some connection between the Datasphere and the SAP Analytics Cloud to get the data, as this is causing headaches sometimes. The knowledge base and Jedox also could be more meaningful. I have tried to search for some specific knowledge base and technology base, and I didn't find them. I have learned it by trial and error.

There is room to improve the integrations between the different products. The AFS, and the Data action, need improvement. Sometimes they release new tools and updates, but not in my area.

I have been using the solution for twelve months.

It is a stable product. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Fourteen consultants are using the SAP Cloud for planning and budgeting and are impressed with it as they did not introduce any other tool. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

Since it is a stable tool we did not have to contact the technical support team.

The initial setup is a little difficult. It takes time to learn about the Datasphere and the SEB. Actually, I have joined an ongoing project, so I didn't know how much time it would take.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

Analytics Cloud integrates your system with a platform, takes data from it, and interprets those data. We have two clients using it now.

It's easy to connect Analytics Cloud with other SAP solutions, and it's also effortless to deploy. You don't need much technical skill to set it up. It's as easy as setting up a tablet. I said tablet before. It's very easy to actually set up.

SAP could add more templates to the platform.

We started using SAP Analytics in 2020, then moved the system to Azure. We decided to also use Analytics Cloud as the reporting tool. Analytics Cloud is similar to Tableau, Domo, etc.

Analytics Cloud is a highly stable solution.

Analytics Cloud is scalable because it's cloud-based.

Setting up Analytics Cloud is straightforward. If you use SAP solutions, you can deploy it in a week because there are templates in the system. There are reporting templates you can leverage, but you can also build a custom template in the system. It depends on the number of reports, but it shouldn't take more than a week or two.

The license is very cheap

I rate SAP Analytics Cloud nine out of 10. It's a very useful tool.

We use this solution for real-time dashboards, modeling data and for predictive analytics. It is used on a daily basis by 300 people in our business. 

The visualizations have been the most valuable feature.

The integration with other vendors and solutions could be improved. The visualizations and reporting capabilities could also be improved. In a future release, we would like to have access to built-in API capabilities. This would remove some of the manual work involved in reporting. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer service team are very responsive and knowledgeable. I would rate them a four out of five. 

Positive

An in-house team implemented this solution. 

 This solution offers value for money and you get what you pay for. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for data visualizations.

The general management of this solution could be improved. The graphics or icons could also be improved to allow them to integrate with other environments on the web.

In a future release, it would be great to have improved connectivity to make it easier to read other kinds of metadata from other data sources.

I have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution, however, scalability is a matter of cost. 

The technical support for this solution is okay. Support tickets are responded to based on priority. 

Neutral

This solution is pricey.

I would recommend this solution for companies that are SAP dependent with users working in this environment. If company's core applications are not SAP based, I wouldn't advise using this solution, because it's pricey. It is possible to get comparable usability with other tools that are much cheaper in the market.

I would recommend this solution for large enterprises. For small enterprises, I would rather recommend solutions such as Tableau or Power BI.  

SAP Analytics Cloud is comparatively the same as other BI tools, such as Power BI or Tableau. However, this solution has more programmability and allows you to do more application development. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We use this solution as part of an embedded analytics use case for an ERP application. SAP are starting to embed Analytics Cloud as a solution within their ERP application, which gives you the options for closed-loop analytics, as you go from insights to action within a single ERP application. It can also be used to bring together multiple data sources, different sources of data from various applications and use the application to blend and trade analytics solutions across different parts of the organization. The product suits small to large enterprise, it supports all user types. We are partners with SAP and I'm an analytics practice lead.  

A point of differentiation in the market for Analytics Cloud compared to other analytics products, is it offers not only business intelligence within the application, but also it has inbuilt AI and machine learning capabilities that can be used not only by data scientist types in the organization, but for general users who can get the benefit of inbuilt predictive features in the tool. The other really compelling part of it is that it's also a planning application. You can do full life cycle from plan through execution in a single platform. That's quite unique for SAP. A lot of the other software vendors do analytics products and they do planning products. This is quite a unique combination that has both BI predictive and planning in a single application. And that's really where its strengths is.

I think what could be improved is a lot of those intelligent features that I mentioned, the AI and predictive functions within the tool work really well with data that you import into the platform, but it doesn't work as well with SAP live connections. If they could make those predictive features available to any source, whether it's SAP or non SAP, it would be a really, really compelling product. 

I'd like to see formatted reporting as an additional feature, such as pixel perfect style formatted reporting. I'd also like to see the product on parity when you compare acquired data and live data models, to know that the features are identical. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

I believe the stability needs more work. The product was first released about five years ago and it's still maturing, which means a lot of new functionality is released with each update. Sometimes that can be a little bit disruptive as features change. 

The scalability is pretty good, you've got options of either having it publicly hosted, or you can also have a private hosting option in a restricted area in the cloud data center. You can also add capacity to it quite easily. It's elasticity as an application for scale-out is pretty good. And underneath the covers, it runs SAP HANA, which is an in-memory database. So that makes a pretty performance. I'm happy with it. 

The technical support could be improved. 

I would say that Analytics Cloud is definitely improving although it's not yet fully comparable. There are some features in BusinessObjects that are not yet in Analytics Cloud, but I would say, from my perspective, that the overall the benefits and advantages of using SAC outweigh BusinessObjects. 

Initial setup is somewhere in the middle of straightforward and complex, it just depends on the source of information. It's not overly simple and it's not overly complex. We have the solution up and running with customers in three weeks for a trial, and that's sending up the application, connecting it to their source systems and demonstrating one really good example of a dashboard or report. We carry out the deployment internally. There's very little maintenance required because it's software as a service, a SaaS offering, a lot of that housekeeping and maintenance and upgrade of the solution is managed by SAP, by the software vendors. Again, that's one of its strong selling points, it requires very little administration overhead.

I believe that SAC is cheaper than BusinessObjects for a basic user license. It's difficult to compare because one is an on-premise pricing model and the other is subscription based. You're not really comparing apples with apples. For some of the more advanced functionalities, though, it can be more expensive. Analytics Cloud is subscription-based. There are different tiers of licensing that give you different access to different functionalities, but assuming you have all of that, there is no additional hosting or set up costs, its fully included in the price per user. 

It's really important to think about data governance in the solution because it's very much a self-service application. It can be quite open for users to create their own versions of data, so it's really important that you think about customers, think about a data governance model to make sure that there's clear ownership of data, and there's a clear single source of truth for enterprise data in the model. It's easy to create a situation where it's open, but you still very much need to consider having a data governance strategy that underpins your Analytics Cloud implementation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

SAP used to provide two tools, SAP BI and SAP BPC. The SAP BI tool provided analytics, while the SAP BPC tool provided budgeting and planning functionality. However, We later consolidated these two tools into one tool, SAP Analytics for Cloud. This tool provides both budgeting and analytics functionality.

I have seen a lot of benefits from using SAP Analytics, but I think people have not yet fully realized its potential. I believe the system is still in its revolutionary stage because it has a lot of capabilities that have yet to be fully explored. In order to take advantage of these capabilities, we need to have a business story and our own analytics or business analytics requirements. I myself have only used SAP Analytics for a very small use case, but I can see how it could be used for enterprise-level planning, reporting, and dashboarding.

The most valuable feature of the tool is machine learning. The machine learning algorithms are inbuilt and strong. I really like that feature because we don't need to do any coding. Normally, we used to do coding in Jupyter notes or Anaconda. It's another tool for analytics or for data science. We used to write Python code, and then try to fetch the data from the backend system, and perform the analysis, based on the batch. SAP Analytics is more real-time analytics and the use case which I use the tool for, with S/4HANA itself. SAP Analytics makes it much easier for me to have the data directly in real-time, to perform this machine learning. I have also seen some good automation features for budgeting and budgeting processes. This combined feature gives a very good flavor to perform the analytics.

SAP has always had one problem with its products, they make them very closed systems that are difficult to integrate. This is not only a problem with SAP Analytics but also with other products, like middleware systems. These systems, such as GRC, reside in the second level of defense, rather than the first. All these analytical systems normally require a huge integration, because they are not working independently. They are dependent on the backend systems. In any analytical system, we don't have data. Basically, we fetch the data or we try to take the data from any recording system such as an ERP recording system, CRM recording system, or any recording system. We perform the analysis in the analytical layer, which is our analytical tool, such as frauds, business integrated screening, SAP GRC, or even the SAC, SAP Analytics for Cloud. All of these require a huge integration. The problem I faced with SAP Analytics was the ease of integration and the cost. SAP Analytics for Cloud is not cost-friendly. we encounter the same issue with all SAP tools. Although SAP has a very beautiful and seamless integration within their system, it is not as easy to integrate them with non-SAP tools, as our Enterprise system does not have all SAP systems. They instead have multiple systems, including Oracle and Microsoft systems. Even though SAP has very beautiful plugins, which we can utilize and get benefit from that, it is not as friendly compared to other tools.

In 2012 or 2013, SAP's interfaces were a big challenge because they were very engineering-oriented and dry, making them difficult for business users to understand. Fiori was introduced as a solution to this problem, and it has been successful in doing so. However, I believe that SAP still needs to work on the integration aspect.

SAC is not the number one tool for analytics. However, if an organization has SAP backend products, then SAC falls within the system of analytics. The system of analytics requires a system of recording, which is the ERP system, CRM, or any other backend system that automates business processes. I believe that a little work is required in that aspect by SAP to improve.

I have been using the tool for several years.

The tool is stable.

I give the scalability a nine out of ten.

Most of the organizations I work for have a maximum attention licensing agreement with SAP, so the support service is amazing. We've never faced any delays with that.

If we have more backend systems using SAP, it's really easy to set up SAP Analytics, but if that is not the case it becomes very difficult to integrate.

SAP Analytics can be very costly to license, which can make it difficult for organizations to implement.

I evaluated SPSS and Alteryx.

I give the tool a seven out of ten.

I was looking for a tool that could help me add value-added services to my department, such as predictive analytics from the audit perspective. I wanted a tool that could analyze text, mostly based on natural language processing. There are other heavy tools that could be applied to the audit lifecycle to improve the process. I was looking for a data analysis tool that would help me roll out the fifth generation of our internal audit department. I considered several options, including SPSS, Alteryx, and SAP Analytics. There is a generation of auditors and assurance professionals called 4.0 or 5.0 who are turning from performing basic analytics to using advanced analytics tools with AI to enhance their audit processes. They are becoming more proactive and using bottom-up analytics. This is a little bit technical for some people. In the same way that we have fourth-generation audit insurance, we have the fourth industrial revolution in the generic industry, we have a revolution in the audit department, a fourth-generation revolution, where we apply AI tools, RPA, robotic process, and advanced analytics to improve our processors. This allows us to perform more audits, 15-20 instead of 10, and to do so using a complete database rather than samples. As an auditor, we will no longer be providing reasonable assurance that we cannot provide everything, we will be able to provide assurance on the entire database. The analytics will automate this process for us, so I'm launching that strategy. In my strategy, I have, for example, some contracts I want to automate instead of reviewing them manually. Each and every contract, for example, comes to the audit department. Instead of reviewing the contract manually, and spending hours, converting this from the OCR text, and then applying the NLP on it, trying to identify the risks and the threats within this contract, and trying to audit based on that risk template, I can automate this process. I'm a certified professional in GRC and ECC. I've been working in this field for a long time. I've seen predictive analytics in action, and I've tried to compare the effectiveness of different tools, like SPSS and Alteryx, with SAP Analytics. I'm doing this because I want to see how much these tools can help me with my overall strategy. But I know that no single tool can guarantee success. We need a bunch of tools. For example, we have this SAP Celonis, which can help us understand business processes and do business process re-engineering and analysis. This SAP Celonis will help automate the process of understanding business processes, instead of having manual meetings with the business and trying to understand everyone's understanding of the process. We can rely on the data to tell us the truth. The central truth is the data. SAP Celonis will take the event log and try to analyze the process on our behalf, and try to give us the anomalies in our business process. The strategy has a different flavor, different tools, and different aspects. SAP Analytics would be more helpful in the audit execution process, and reporting stage. There is another tool that helps with fraud management. It's called business integrity screening. This tool basically fetches data and tests it for us. The tool also gathers information from SAP Analytics for Cloud and performs predictive analytics with strong machine learning algorithms. SAP Analytics is not the only thing I use to achieve my goals. It is a part of my strategy, and it helps me automate certain aspects of my plan.

An organization that has its backend systems as SAP would be making a smart move to go with SAP Analytics, but if they have a mix of SAP or non-SAP systems, I never advise organizations to go with SAP Analytics. An organization that does not have SAP in the backend and still wished to use SAP Analytics should perform a proper requirement analysis first.