I think a lot of users aren't having fun using SAP because it requires putting in a lot of information by keyboard directly because it requires some coding, so this is one area for improvement.

From a user point of view, SAP is a complex system where you can learn and teach, so another area for improvement in the solution is that it needs to be more user-friendly.

In the next release of SAP, I want it to have a friendlier menu for its users.

SAP Lumira can improve if they game more capability to the end user to prepare dashboards because it's more of an IT task to create them. In Tableau, we can drag, drop, and create. However, in SAP Lumira, we need a designer and a separate KT to be able to do it well.

One area where I would like to see improvement is the speed. It needs so much resources. I would like to see everything running on the server rather than having it separated between the Lumira server and Lumira desktop, with one flavor here, one flavor there. I would like to have everything in one place, so that you don't really need to worry about having a lot of resources on the PCs, especially if you want to deploy the solution to business users. If it's not a high tech company, we don't give them any PCs with 10 TB of memory.

I'm rating it a five. When they improve its performance, it can go to seven or eight. If they add even more drill-down features and so on, it can be a 10.

I think there is room for improvement in connectivity, basic connectivity across data sources or datasets. HANA is a new set that we could connect to, but there are limitations for blending data with multiple sources with HANA.

Same thing on the BW side, there could probably be some improvement with the run time or the ease of connecting and bringing bigger datasets back to the tool itself.

Another connectivity option or issue is, if there's 100 HANA views out there, the end users don't know the technical or the common names to go to. I think giving some more intuitive way to select the connections in use would be a better feature.

I'm rating it a seven because of the deficiencies with connectivity across the BW and HANA platforms. There's different version mismatches that bring down the rating.

With the geospatial coding for latitude and longitude, there are deficiencies if you have a column, a specific one for latitude, and one for longitude, you really need to concatenate it together for the UI or the Lumira application to leverage it. When exporting basic models that you're using to a PDF file, it renders blank PDF pages to us, so that capability was useless.

A lot of bugs keep coming up when we connect to HANA or create our custom color palette. Also, after coding JavaScript, sometimes the elements get hidden behind the graph and then there is no way to know how to make modifications. Another concern is the security regarding which users are allowed which kinds of data sources. This setting is done on the BI platform. Ours is 4.1 but still, there is security for Hadoop as a data source.

I think probably what I was trying to do at the time was create some sort of map if you will. I work a lot with freight data, transportation data and I've been trying to find a solution to show volumes and distances out of a specific point so if we've got a distribution center in Dallas, Texas, something that I can just drop the data in and by zip code it will show you know a heat map of the zip codes that we're shipping to and don't recall the mirror being able to do that.

I would say a better integration with the Business Objects platform. To develop the views, it's not user friendly. It's a great tool for developers to create the information model for Lumira. Once that has been developed then it's easier for the users to then go in and manipulate the data that's within that view, but it's not a great tool for the end user to poll data, to cleanse data, to merge data. All that, it's much better for a developer tool, but for the end users to then dynamically interact with it once the developer had built the framework for it.

I don't see that this would add a lot of value to our buyers. But for store operations, looking at how things have been running in the stores, it could be a good tool. People that are interested and have a passion for analyzing data, this is a great tool for them. Again it's not a tool for everybody, and not a tool for probably most senior executives. It is a pretty analytical tool and it requires that kind of mind set, either on the business side or on the IT side.

It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources. Also, the publishing and sharing integration with BIP and other cloud products needs work.

It would be valuable if I could more easily share what I do. Right now, where I work, we have SAP BusinessObjects, but there's no way to easily store on a server and share. If we could store models I create in a folder that I could share. Sharing is something that I think should be improved.

Also, because Lumira saves directly to your My Documents folder, it stays in your C: drive. That means I cannot simply share it with the team in my department. They have to make it easier for you to store in any folder, not just My Documents, because My Documents is on my C: drive, and that makes no sense. I thought, "Why did they do that?"

Another thing that should be improved is the connection, the ability to use different sources in the same model. I think Lumira can do it, but it's not easy. We don't have HANA, so I cannot easily access any of the queries I have in BusinessObjects. I have to go to BusinessObjects, export to Excel, and then input the Excel file into Lumira.

Not being able to use data that is updated continuously is something that really bothers me, because I have to keep remembering, "I have to update this, I have to update this." I know that the refresh works, it refreshes and it's really really good.

Also, sometimes it doesn't input data, which is really important. For example, if there is an Excel file that is really big, like 1GB, it was just unable to input it. I just couldn't work with it. The file I was using was perfect. The file didn't have any blocks or something like that. I don't know why it didn't input that one.

Also, if you have one visualization, and you want to show several areas or windows that you can resize and so on. With Lumira, it's very difficult to resize it because the areas are square. It's not like what I had before.

I would like to see them improve the format of the text that you use, so you can play more with fonts, and put more information on one screen.

The ability to bring in a Lumira application inside of another SAP tool like Design Studio. I don't know if that's offered yet. Whatever you create in Lumira, it would be nice to have the option to import it into Design Studio or Webby, or vice versa.

I know for the geo map you have to have an account with Esri. It would be good if you have the license for the tool, you don't have to have a separate account with Esri for the geo mapping. It should be combined into one license.

Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents.

It also needs more functionality when creating visualizations (basic functionality exists; would like ability to do more complex functions).

It additional could use greater ability to manipulate data in the Prepare tab.

Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow. Even with 128GB of RAM on our server, the execution time is still slow.

There are improvement that need to be made everywhere.

Lumira's capabilities feel like that of a store app with the intuitiveness of a desktop app, which is not a good combination. For SAP, Lumira may seem phenomenal, but when you take your SAP glasses off, it pales in comparison to other products in this space. 

An area of improvement, for sure, is the flexibility of the visualization. Often, my clients want us to see the data in a very specific way, maybe with their color palettes or whatever they want to see. Lumira is not very flexible when it comes to the color palette, or even being able to sort of like change the axes so that I want to see data in a different order. I want to see the bars in a different order, things like that. It's harder to manipulate than if I were to use Excel, where it's very simple to manipulate that kind of thing.

Lumira is a little bit more what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but if you need to change it substantially, I still go back to Excel.

It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions.

I would look at the geospatial part of it which doesn't seem work well as when you look at converting that for your maps, it a little cumbersome, and it's not as accurate. It doesn't seem to do it as accurately so it's needs to be done manually. It's more of the data prep part of it.

There are several features that competitors have in the reporting tools market, such as Qlikview, Crystal Reports, and Dashboard Designer. SAP should make Lumira more comparable and competitive to those solutions.

It would be great to have more ETL capabilities so that the user can do more cleansing/mining on his/her side.

The Cloud/Edge version of SAP Lumira still needs to be more user friendly. It's still in the initial stages, so we can expect more features in future releases. SAP is coming up with a new improved cloud version.

I am happy with the product, but they could improve in the discovery of the product.

It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult. Once you know what is where, one can design the visualization. To know what is where using Lumira is difficult.

An easier printing feature.