My advice to anyone looking into using SAP is that if there's a possibility to implement it, then please do because it'll give you several benefits. You'll have complete control of your company. Every ERP system is good for the company, but remember that SAP isn't cheap.

My rating for SAP is nine out of ten because it's a stable system and possibly the best in the world.

My company is an SAP customer.

SAP Lumira comes with SAP Business Object. I would advise others to make sure the use case for the use of SAP Lumera fits because there are other tools in the market which might be a better solution than SAP Lumera. Since we already had a SQL license and we had SAP Business Object, that's why we implemented SAP Lumira. There was no extra cost.

I rate SAP Lumira a six out of ten.

It is a product that's easy to learn and understand, with the ability to create dynamic visualizations and various integration options including next-to real-time.

It was comparable to the other solutions that I looked at as far as being able to just get in there and dump some data in and go.

I would say expect to do a number of proof of concepts for various departments before finding a successful partner to implement with. As a client it's great, as an application, I would expect as an application with Business Objects, that integration is still not great. From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting. But as a client it's awesome.

This product is amazing and changes how people think of the relationship between IT and businesses. It makes processes easier and faster and enables businesses to know exactly what they need so that their storyboard becomes more accurate and easy for them to present.

It's really user-friendly.

I feel like something's missing, but I can't put my hand on it what's missing, if that makes sense. It's a great tool though.

Choose a few people to become super users with Lumira (one business user and one technical user), and allow them to champion the product and teach others what they’ve learned. Watch YouTube videos!

I would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel. I'd give Lumira a score of nine out of ten.

Don't waste your time. Lumira falls short of its competitors in this space both in capabilities and in ease of use. It has somewhat of a updated front end, but it suffers from its cobbling together of older technology components, i.e Webi menu hierarchy and a dialogue-box approach.

As a visualization tool, Xcelsius is superior to Lumira; as a data acquisition tool, Lumira is a vast improvement. In Xcelsius, it's difficult to get a finished product, but the finished product can be stunning. Although not as difficult, Lumira makes getting lack luster results harder than they should be. Lumira leaves you wondering whether the result you get is worth the effort you put in. 

If you put your SAP glasses on and make believe the rest of the world does not exist, Lumira can seem like a God-send. Short of that, I cannot in good conscience recommend rolling this out to end users. It feels very much like a concept-in-progress rather than a finished product. Unlike true technology companies (Google, Apple Microsoft) which invest billions a year in research projects -- research projects that may not have payoff in 10 years -- Lumira is the result of a quarter-to-quarter company mentality. What can I rehash to sell you now to meet my numbers? If SAP wants our money, they are going to have to meet us half-way and start investing some of theirs in products that we can use today and which put us in a position to take advantage of tomorrow, i.e. wider data integration with non-SAP data sources (the world doesn’t revolve around HANA), Cortana, conversation OS, SMS instead of screens, and the list goes on.

The challenge should’ve been simple: give me the same capabilities of Xcelsius with some updated features, and deliver it in a package that’s simple, intuitive and easier than before. Although clever, Lumira falls short on all these fronts.

Instead of improving or expanding the capabilities of Webi, SAP decided to create a new product. However, instead of the product being new, it seems to be a new face atop a set of glued components from their older products. From what I have gathered, there is nothing in Lumira that is not already available in an existing SAP product in some form or another. Lumira appears to be a watered-down version of these capabilities found across the SAP product line. I guess all this is to limit cannibalization. What this watering down leads to is an artificially-limited BI tool. This watering down is done while retaining the complexity inherited from the grafted pieces of its older technology. 

This is a reflection of how SAP views BI. Instead of BI being ubiquitous, SAP views BI as products they can sell. You have to go to a product to do a certain type of “BI”. Hence, SAP takes BI capabilities and provides them across twelve products (four in the future, which is still too many). Conversely, the Microsoft philosophy is to provide BI capabilities within and across all its tools, with PowerBI being a standalone culmination. Microsoft accomplishes all this elegantly in a well thought out product without adding complexity. Lumira is to PowerBI what Blackberry is to the iPhone. 

I get it, SAP must sell "new" products. With the saturation of the traditional ERP market, SAP must introduce new products to grow revenue. They have to do so without cannibalizing the products they have in other markets. This drives how SAP approaches the market. This reality appears to limit Lumira’s capabilities and feature set as it must always be careful not to cross over into capabilities found in sister products BO or Data services, Explorer etc. This is not the case with PowerBI, hence PowerBI has a broader feature set that, ironicall, is easier for SAP to use.  As a result, PowerBI is a superior product which widens the gap with every month’s release. 

Making the comparison is almost unfair. Even though they are both cars, it’s like asking to compare an upgraded Yugo to a new Ferrari. And in this case, the Ferrari costs less. So why would anyone in their right mind choose the Yugo? Someone who is used to using horses, of course, and no one is better at selling used cars than SAP.

The good news is that SAP can change this. But it’s going to cost them to convert from a technology company with products from a product company that has acquired some technology. One has immediate payback while the other may take years to see a profit.

My rating is because I see the potential that it has for the business user. I don't think it's quite at the point where it's flexible enough to be a stand-alone data visualization tool, the only one you use, because, as I've mentioned, I still use Excel. I use Excel more than I use Lumira for some specific reports and similar tasks, but I often find myself using Lumira for some of the fancier reports. For example, the geographical and other reports that Excel doesn't do quite as well. I see that it has a lot of really great tools, but it's not flexible enough for to use day-to-day.

Engage a SAP Lumira product team, and ask questions to understand how many deployment options there are available with SAP Lumira. Choose the option that fits your strategy and seek advice from the SAP Lumira support team on how best to deploy for maximum ROI.

I think the simplicity of putting it together or being able to visualize the data is the best thing, because once it's connected, it's drag-and-drop. You can then create your storyboards and it's pretty straightforward. If you're familiar with using any kind of program or tool, it's pretty straightforward to get the results that you need.

The only problem I had was just getting some of the data prepped. I would say they need to focus on getting that type of stuff improved.

You have to prep your data, and sometimes you have to change your field types, especially if you take your zip code and you try to convert that into geospatial so you can do a display of your sales on a map. It's not as straightforward as it could be, and it doesn't quite do a good enough job. You might be in the right state, but you may not be in at quite the right location. It's still better, it's still good, but there could be some more improvement there.

It is really easy to use and provides the best results. It can really help any organization/domain to build their own dashboards easily and to analyze complex data.

Lumira is a really good data exploration tool. Download the desktop tool and give it a try.

It's a pretty good solution, but you should wait for SAP’s new improved version of Lumira.

It has a good interface. It is not so good for analysis.

This solution is easy to use. It is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration.