SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

We primarily use the solution for the dashboards. 

The close integration with other SAP products is great. 

The initial setup is easy.

It is quite stable.

Technical support is helpful.

The product can scale. 

It's lacking a bit in maturity and we find we can't replace our existing mode 1 analytics tool until it's improved. 

I've been using the solution for 12 months. 

The stability is quite good. It doesn't crash or freeze. there are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable. 

We have about 50 people using the solution right now. They are all business specialists. We find it to be scalable.  

Technical support has been quite good. We haven't had any issues with them. They are helpful and responsive and we are satisfied. 

Positive

We found the initial setup to be pretty simple and straightforward. I'd rate it four out of five in terms of ease of setup. 

The deployment took one to two months and I handled it myself. 

I didn't need any assistance with the setup. I was able to do it on my own. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's likely the latest one.

I'd advise other users that the solution isn't really mature just yet. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a 7 out of ten.  

We have been using this solution for story development on the cloud.

This is a very easy solution to learn. It took us only one month to grasp all of the SAC concepts.

The new Application Design option offers lots of customization options by being able to script in TypeScript (similar to JavaScript).

It provides easy predictive capabilities with a large number of options to choose from, including date handling.

The what-if analysis sets it apart from other reporting tools like Qlik and Power BI!

The most valuable features of this solution are:

• It is Cloud based.
• Predictive analysis
• Application design/analytic application.
• The "what-if" analysis.
• Easy date handling including options for ytd, lytd, etc.
• There are lots of table features including adding comments.
• Responsive pages.
• Smart Insights.
• Smart discovery.

The next release could include features like:

1. A community that creates custom charts.
2. Table cell size formatting.
3. Formatting options for Data Labels.
4. Allowing comments within small teams.
5. There should be more features for the time series charts.
6. Rebuild models without affecting any chart.

SAC is already working on some of these!

My impression is that the stability of this solution is very high.

This is a highly scalable solution.

This solution has excellent support and customer service. It is the best compared to other vendors that I have dealt with until now.

I have used Qlik and Power BI, but after learning SAC I felt that it was better to move to this solution. The main reasons for changing are its ease of use and better capabilities.

Extremely easy setup, since it is cloud-based. Only in the rarest cases is there a failure.

We performed the implementation in-house.

We have realized ROI through improved Business Intelligence and Analytics.

It is a bit expensive, but really worth it, especially if you are already using other SAP tools.

We evaluated several options including QlikView, QlikSense, and Power BI.

My only suggestion is that people try SAC, and start using it.

The most valuable feature of SAP Analytics Cloud for data analysis tasks is its compatibility with the SAP ecosystem. It is easy to integrate with SAP ERP and BW systems, allowing smooth data transfer and live connections without much development. This compatibility makes it stand out, especially compared to other systems like Power BI or Tableau, which often require more adaptation and specific development. Additionally, it supports SAP's push towards cloud solutions, integrating well with SAP BTP and other cloud offerings.

To improve SAP Analytics Cloud, I would like to see more advanced machine learning capabilities, similar to those in SAP BTP. Additionally, better support for connecting to various data sources without needing many workarounds or IT-related activities would be beneficial.

Additionally, in the future, I would like to see improved support for third-party systems, lower cost of acquisition, and better graphics and interface design. These improvements would enhance the tool's usability and presentation capabilities, especially for customer-facing reports.

I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for about two years.

SAP's technical support is average. Opening a ticket usually resolves issues, and depending on the support level, response times can be as quick as four hours. Overall, it is pretty standard and I would rate the support as a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of SAP Analytics Cloud can be complex, especially with specific requests like multiple users logging in with SSOs. We have faced challenges integrating these scenarios, which reflects some complexities within the SAP ecosystem. While compatibility within SAP is an advantage, these technical challenges suggest it could be even more difficult with third-party systems.

We use SAP Analytics Cloud for real-time decision-making by sitting it on top of our ERP system to track the sales pipeline. It helps the sales and executive teams follow the pipeline stages, from data qualification to cash. We use dashboards to display created sales orders, and PRs in SAP, and send invoices, delays, approvals, and billing requests. It helps the CEO and C-level executives easily see our sales progress, expected revenue for the quarter, and overall performance of our product offerings. So far, it is working well.

SAP Analytics Cloud improves our planning by giving quick visibility into what is happening. For example, we can see which customers are interacting with our demo pages. This feedback helps sales be proactive, asking specific questions and offering help based on customer interest. It helps us respond in real-time.

The integration capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud have benefited our business systems by making adoption easier. Since it uses familiar SAP interfaces and icons, the transition is smoother, requiring less training. While it may not compete with the design aspects of tools like Qlik or Tableau, its compatibility within the SAP ecosystem reduces the workload, thanks to the standardized icons and interfaces.

For first-time users, I would rate the user-friendliness of SAP Analytics Cloud at around six out of ten. For users already familiar with the SAP environment, I would rate it at eight. While compatibility is a strong point, aesthetics, and UI presentation are weaker areas for SAP.

I wouldn't recommend SAP Analytics Cloud for small to medium-sized companies. The cost of acquisition and support can be steep, and integration with third-party systems might be slower compared to alternatives like Tableau or Qlik, which are cheaper and more suitable for smaller businesses.

Overall, I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud as a seven out of ten.

I am a consultant and SAP Analytics Cloud is one of the solutions that I work with.

We created our queries in SAP BW and then we use them in Analytics Cloud. We have modules like MFI and reports.

All of the modules that we used to have separately in our on-premises solution are now integrated into one platform.

The quality of reports for the users is very good.

The Application Designer is a good tool.

I would like to see reporting to the Analytics cloud directly. As it is now, we can integrate text reports in Analytics Cloud, but every time we create a model then we have to design the reports. It is taking a long time because we have fifty to sixty reports.

I have been using this solution for two to three months.

This solution is mostly stable.

We have two or three people using this solution, although they are not using it full time. We have given them training, but they are taking some time to get acquainted.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. I have not used all the features and not used the application designer yet.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to this solution, we were using Business Objects. We were more acquainted with the WEBI tool and Crystal Reports, and have now moved to the Analytics Cloud.

We switched because, in the future, SAP Cloud is going to support export to HANA.

The initial setup of this solution was quite simple.

I did face a little bit of complexity when I was connecting the Analytics Cloud to BW, but everything else was fine.

We performed the implementation in-house.

We thought about going with Tableau Cloud. We attended some sessions on SAP Analytics Cloud and learned about the integration with HANA, and we felt that it would be very good so we chose it.

My advice to anybody who is thinking about moving out of their standalone system is to implement this solution. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

I am a developer and I work mostly on the technical side.

The most valuable features are on the application side, where you can design applications into your analytics on the platform.

There are many scripting capabilities with a language that is close to JavaScript. It's not exactly JavaScript but it's a spin-off of it.

It has a rich number of templates included that you can enhance.

It's easier to get going on, compared to other solutions. 

Many of my clients are apprehensive when you have to deploy the solution. They ask you if the data could be transferred to visualization software.

It's cloud-based, and what's good about the cloud is that it doesn't need to store any data. It can read your data and generate it from the NetApp file. It can generate your model or how your model is going to look like. You don't need to transfer your data set to the cloud to report on.

It's quite flexible.

The pricing could be improved. It's quite expensive.

I don't know how usable it is for other platforms. 

In terms of connectivity, if you want to report on live data you have to use what is called the calculation view. It's a graphical view of SAP HANNA, but it's quite limiting as a structure.

They need support for more languages, Python for example. I know that Tableau does this quite well.

If you can integrate more features from the programming side, it would enhance analytics especially the languages that are more analytics-based such as R. I think SAP Analytics Cloud supports a measure of R but could be enhanced.

I may have a narrow view of its usage, but I think that it is quite dependent on SAP environments.

I have not encountered any clients who are using it for Oracle ERP or an Oracle database and are reporting are using SAP cloud.   

It's quite, vendor narrow. For an analytics platform, it's quiet, vendor restrictive.

I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for a year and a half.

It's quite stable.

It's a scalable product.

We work with medium-sized enterprise companies, but mostly large-sized clients use SAP. Pharmaceuticals can be used as an example.

It has good technical support.

Previously, I have tried Tableau but not project wise in terms of deployment. I have a lab where I can do some trials.

Also, I have worked with PowerBI a little bit but not in-depth.

It's quite expensive and costs a lot to maintain, especially with licensing.

If the client is SAP-based then I would say it's quite okay to implement this product. 

It's stable, provided they have the budget for the licensing which is, I think most of the time, the bottleneck. Also, they have to consider other supply systems, their internal users. What is the diversity, how many of them work on strictly SAP solutions, and what are the compatibility issues where you cannot be stuck with one product?

I think it's pretty much okay provided you can scale and then it depends on how technical the people are. So, we have two variants of it in SAP. 

There is the SAP Analytics Cloud Discovery, which is just mainly for discovery analytics. You basically create SAP reports, nothing advanced. Then you have the Designer, which enables you to do a little bit more scripting and other advanced features. Depending on the end-user population, you can train down towards the pure basic reporting or really develop an application on it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

My VP asked me to work with my plan number to figure out how to increase and support our sales region. On the planning admin, I created a model and then imported actual and forecasted data. From that, I was able to determine the variance. We managed to plan this with small amounts of data. 

We created a planning model and enabled it to make a planning checkmark that works with the time category in the tab dimension, in order to bring it down to the lowest granularity, by month, start date, and end date. 

We created an organization dimension. A responsible person to monitor each region is required. Then you can drag and drop the region hierarchy from the parent.

Then, we worked on the calculated numbers, for example, the gross margin, which was the total revenue minus COGS. We then divided that number by total revenue times one hundred. From there, we could pull the data from the file and select source actuality to validate it. 

We performed all of this using SAP Analytics Cloud.

In the most recent release, the schedule publication was officially updated and it's been added on MS Office 365. I like how we had an EPM for B to C perspective; it's a great enhancement. Also, I believe the B to B connectivity has been improved. Android support for mobile is really good also. Power BI has always had android support in place, so manual support for SAP Analytics Cloud is also a very good feature.

Smart Insights have also been enhanced, especially in regards to the Stories.

Apart from that, I would like to see more data-handling enhancement. Smart planning can give us immediate results.  When we come to analytics, If we could get more enhancement, we could probably completely skip the data warehousing concepts. This would be a big improvement.

With all of the new updates, now we can combine different types of data together and give our customers a full picture. 

I am happy with the new release that is coming out. It's comparatively a little slower than the version we had from 2019-2020; however, the enhancements they have added are much better than previous versions.

The most valuable feature is that we can allocate, spread, and distribute the actual figures.

The cost is an area that could be improved. I also think that Ofice 365 should be incorporated. People would find it to be more user-friendly with Office 365 integrated. Flat file integration can be a distinguishing factor.

Custom visuals is another area of improvement. There are also some mobile features that are missing. There are features that aren't available on the mobile. 

There should also be better connectivity tools for HANA and Success Factors. They have minimal visualization relations and they have the third-party add-ins.

I have been using this solution for the past six months.

We have 300-plus Stories that we already had in the system, that we had to do performance tuning. I brought it down to 267, to be exact. We had over 302 dashboards and then we brought it down to 111 stories on 267 visualizations. When we have too many pages, the performance gets impacted a little on the initialization part. When we open the story, it takes a little bit of time because it's not on-premise. Because our clients are based in the Netherlands and we are based in Bangalore, we had to manage the different time zones, and the business hours are different. We had to find out during the peak business hour how the SSE behaves.

We found that in the peak business hours it does slow down a little bit, considering the internet speed and everything. We did take everything into account. Then we checked the performance and the data also. In order to be competitive with the other software in the market, a little enhancement in this part also would give the upper hand compared to other BI tools.

We used to go in a cognitive window wherein we don't have any caches in place, so that we could get an accurate picture of the performance. But we also want to reduce the number of filters, and then we want to do more slicing and dicing across the data and try to see how it improves. In the near future, we would try to test the data more.

It performs quite well. Custom visuals would definitely help us to improve a little more. 

There are more viewer licenses. We have got close to 130 users for Analytics Cloud. And for developer access, for read and write, at our location we have around six plus two for planning, altogether 11 to 12 licenses. 

We have BW HANA. So we have only four developers as of now. We used it more extensively before the pandemic but not as much now. We do have plans to increase usage in the near future. 

The technical support is quite good. Any time there is a new release and we have any issues, we connect with the technical support team and then go ahead and write about it in a blog so that the other users can also get help for similar issues. 

We previously used Cognos Analytics and Tableau. I've done a couple of POCs on Tableau and worked on micro-strategy. We switched to SAP Analytics Cloud primarily for the planning, development, and the user-friendliness. When SAP comes up with a solution, they definitely try to be up to market. The features were not in a premature stage. We had faith that SAP had enhanced features compared to other BI tools.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It was also easy for my team. They thought it was easy to install. There's no download, there was no complexity.

We do the maintenance for it because we know the ins and outs of the development. We also do the admin.

If you are new to SSE and are trying to implement SSE in your project, don't think that SSE is an SAP product. Look into the features because I am sure you'll be satisfied with the features. They come out with the releases. I go into the release notes to understand what are the enhancements are. This will make it easier to understand. 

If you have somebody who isn't as experienced with BI, even that person can still learn SSE and can cope up with the BI requirements. In India, if you want to be a BI compatible, you have to have at least three years' experience so that you can understand all of the data warehousing concepts, and EDL. With SSE, learning is very smooth and easy.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

The missing point would be because of the performance. 

The most valuable feature of SAP Analytics Cloud is its integration with SAP.

SAP Analytics Cloud should improve the dashboard.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for approximately two years.

The stability of SAP Analytics Cloud is good.

I rate the stability of SAP Analytics Cloud a nine out of ten.

We are using SAP Analytics Cloud 24 hours a day.

I have used other solutions in the past. Microsoft Power BI has more powerful features, such as a dashboard, overall management, and maintenance.

The initial setup of SAP Analytics Cloud can take a couple of hours.

I recommend that companies using SAP consider not investing in separate analytics solutions in order to fully leverage the benefits of integration. This is because SAP utilizes the same database for administrative functions, such as Oracle for the ART. Consequently, the database itself does not offer significant advantages, as a connector is established between Oracle and other systems. While real-time integration is achievable, it does not adhere to the standard approach. Specifically, SAP S4HANA employs the HANA database for analytics while utilizing the Oracle database for ERP purposes. Therefore, it would be more beneficial for companies using SAP S4HANA to opt for SAP Analytics Cloud.

I rate SAP Analytics Cloud a seven out of ten.

We use SAP Analytics Cloud mainly to get insights into the customer data, such as what type of orders, the type of customers, and correlations among the orders. For example, we also get insights on cash flow, the frequency of orders, and causes for unfulfilled orders.

The data we get from SAP Analytics Cloud is more analytical, where we try to analyze what happened. Based on our analysis, our customers can explain the pitfalls in their current systems.

What my customers like best about SAP Analytics Cloud is the dashboard because it's pretty good.

I also find the data extraction feature, where you extract data to an Excel sheet, useful.

One area for improvement in SAP Analytics Cloud is incorporating Python into the coding. That functionality is available, but it's not as efficient, and it's a bit difficult sometimes to do it, so that could be improved.

Compared to the IBM solution, per many of my customers, SAP Analytics Cloud is less user-friendly than IBM, so this is another area for improvement.

I've worked with SAP Analytics Cloud for more than a year and still use it, though it's not every day that I use it. My usage of SAP Analytics Cloud is on and off based on the client's requirements. My company is an SAP solutions provider, but it doesn't often get requests for SAP Analytics Cloud here in India.

Looking at my period of usage for SAP Analytics Cloud, it seems long, but the actual work is not so much. Sometimes, there's none. The last time I worked with the solution was one month ago.

SAP Analytics Cloud is stable, so my company hasn't received many complaints from a stability point of view.

The scalability of SAP Analytics Cloud is eight out of ten.

My company hasn't had the opportunity to work with enormous data because clients only had a few hundred GBs of data, so not a very big database to work with, but then, with SAP HANA coming in, it's becoming easier to deal with the data. It's much more efficient to handle larger data sets versus connecting with SAP ECC. Connecting to SAP HANA makes the process more efficient and the data transfer much more effortless.

The support for SAP Analytics Cloud could use some improvement because if the client is pretty important, my company receives faster replies from the support team. However, it takes longer for technical support to reply and resolve the issues if the client isn't that big.

I'd rate SAP technical support as six on a scale of one to ten.

Neutral

I was also involved in one or two projects trying to connect SAP Analytics Cloud with IBM Analytics, and it was a good experience, but I haven't worked with an IBM solution. Still, I feel IBM is more flexible because it uses different languages versus SAP Analytics Cloud, where you have to use SAP proprietary language by default. You can use other languages, but you need to do some configurations first, while IBM, out of the box, supports multiple languages, so that's the big difference between SAP Analytics Cloud and IBM Analytics.

The initial setup for SAP Analytics Cloud was pretty easy, primarily because my company only works with SAP solutions, so connecting SAP Analytics Cloud to an SAP environment was easy, with not much hassle.

My company works with multiple solutions, including SAP Analytics Cloud and traditional BI tools.

Because of the SAP partnership, my company doesn't get data from other systems; instead, it only uses data from SAP to create all data services.

Overall, SAP Analytics Cloud is a good solution, and if you're dealing exclusively with SAP products, then it's a good marriage. It's a seven on a scale of one to ten.

I recommend the solution to others because it's excellent. It's a good fit in the overall landscape of SAP.

My company is an SAP partner.