SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

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.

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.

We are using SAP Analytics for complete enterprise. We are customers and I am a business analytics manager. 

The product has helped us to unify reporting between all departments and throughout the entire company; it has improved our organization by streamlining operations. 

Data integration is very good. It's a very good product and cost-effective.

I would like to have more tabular reporting capabilities, like page reports. 

I've been using this solution for more than two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We've had a good experience with customer support. They're active and we have an exclusive relationship manager to move us forward with the product. It provides us with extra care.

Positive

The previous solution we used was not addressing our enterprise needs. 

The initial implementation took a week and then we gradually adopted it throughout the company. Deployment was carried out in-house and we currently have 200 users who range from C-level to end users. We have three people who help out with maintenance and they have backgrounds in engineering or architecture. 

Analytics has improved our bottom line by improving processes. 

We get competitive rates for our licensing so I'm not complaining. 

We evaluated Tableau and Power BI before choosing SAP. The decision to go with SAP was connected to our underlying data. If your data is on SAP and your data warehouse is SAP Business Warehouse, as in our case, it made sense to go with SAP Analytics. 

I think it's important to be strategy-driven based on your underlying data. If you are an SAP-based organization, this is a good solution. If you are non-SAP, then you might be better off looking at an alternative solution. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We are a consulting firm and we implement SAP Analytics Cloud for our clients.

This solution is for digital boardroom purposes.

Our clients do not have knowledge of business analytics, so we assist them by implementing this solution for them. Our customers are made up of medium-sized companies with fewer than one hundred employees.

The visualizations are quite eye-appealing.

The Smart Predict, Smart Insights, and Smart Discovery predictive analysis features are quite good.

Some of the standard visualizations, such as a speedometer or a goal chart, are not there and should be added. These are available in other solutions like R, but with SAP you need to have R code written for them. This can be time-consuming.

I have been using this solution for one and a half years.

This solution is stable.

This is a cloud solution so it is definitely scalable. On average, our clients have between 20 and 30 people who are using SAP Analytics Cloud.

I have also worked with SAP BusinessObjects and QlikView.

The initial setup can be a little bit complex when it comes to establishing the connection. We have seen some difficulties with that. There is a big list of things that you need to go through.

The same things can be done using Tableau.

The suitability of this solution depends on several things including use case, budget, and licensing costs. Tableau will do the same thing as this solution.

If cost is not a problem and you want to try something new then I would recommend SAP Analytics Cloud.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use the product for grid storage, retail, and high-level management. 

The product is flexible and has features like AI, link analysis, and insights. It has many features. I can search, and it creates automatic charts without selecting anything. For example, I can ask, "What is the gross margin?" the tool builds a chart based on my question.

SAP Analytics Cloud's visualization capabilities for data analysis are good. 

The connection works only for importing data. Currently, there is no real-time integration between SAP Analytics Cloud and CRM. There are some features present in the classic but not in the optimized version. If I need to create something specific, I often have to switch the versions. It would be more convenient to have a single product that incorporates all the necessary features.

I have been using the product for three years. 

SAP Analytics Cloud is stable. 

The solution is scalable, and it has six developer users. 

The tool's technical support is not very easy, and they tend to ask many questions, taking more time to respond and get back with another question.

Negative

The tool's onboarding was easy and not complex. It doesn't require any maintenance. 

The solution operates in real-time, but we had an issue with it. Fortunately, the team resolved it. Usually, working with real-time or various-time connections prompts entering connection criteria like a new username and password.

It is also useful for financial planning. Additionally, I use it for costs related to time series jobs.Understanding the forecasting process can be like dealing with a black box. I recognize the need for flexible tools that allow me to choose the algorithm and see what's happening in the backend. It will help to determine whether the forecasting is working or not. 

I recommend the product. It is very useful. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We mainly use Analytics Cloud because it integrates with other SAP solutions. Our ERP is an SAP product, and our back-end is SAP Business Warehouse, so integration is an essential factor.

SAP could add some more visualization features to Analytics Cloud, like charts and analytics. I would also like to see some more data cleaning and ad hoc functions added to this solution.

I've been using SAP Analytics Cloud for almost three years now.

We have around 1,500 people using Analytics Cloud. Everyone from the lowest interns to the C-level suite uses it. 

I rate SAP support seven out of 10. It's good but not at the expected level.

Setting up Analytics Cloud is straightforward because it's a cloud service provided by SAP. Once you sign the contract, they give you the URL, and you can use the product. Everything is out of the box.

We considered Microsoft BI, but it didn't have the same seamless integration with SAP.

I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud seven out of 10 because the product needs to mature a lot. SAP still needs to add several features to make it a robust BI solution. For example, they should improve the charts and table components.