SAP Analytics Cloud in S/4HANA and its benefits to know of!

SAP Analytics Cloud is a solution that brings analytics and planning together with a distinctive integration to SAP applications while ensuring smooth access to heterogeneous sources of data. With the move to S/4HANA, businesses can take the advantage of this analytics solution to accelerate faster and effective decision-making as it gets integrated to the new ERP system. Read this blog to learn how SAP Analytics Cloud and S/4HANA goes hand-in-hand!

1. What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

Briefly speaking, SAP Analytics Cloud is a planning and analytics solution within the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) that supports integrated planning process enterprise-wide and gives valuable insights to help organisations make informed decisions. Its live integration to SAP S/4HANA helps monitor enterprise data in real time, along with gaining in-context and analytics driven insights, further helping organisations accelerate decision-making, create integrated strategies, and adapt faster to the ever-changing technological landscape.

2. Why does SAP S/4HANA cloud embed the SAP Analytics Cloud?

Apart from integrated operational processes, to make an intelligent enterprise, organisations require first-class analytics; businesses expect pre-defined reporting that can be seamlessly embedded into their day-to-day operations. In addition to this, personalised access to data and ad-hoc analytical capabilities to get higher value of the enterprise data are also a few aspects that organisations expect. Therefore, by integrating SAP Analytics Cloud into the SAP S/4HANA cloud, organisations can achieve all the mentioned requisites, especially with the 1911 release.

3. Embedding SAP Analytics Cloud: How does it work?

It is important to note that each SAP S/4HANA cloud customer or tenant is provided with a new SAP Analytics Cloud. This helps the analytics cloud access the ABAP CDS view* in real-time while using the transient analytical queries that are generated automatically for the CDS views. Additionally, the UIs for the analytics cloud will be embedded in iFrames and then publish them on the Fiori Launchpad.

Whether it is user provisioning and connectivity or content management and lifecycle, all the relevant SAP Analytics Cloud features are published as APIs. Hence, the embedded analytics cloud can be controlled remotely by the embedding applications. Keep in mind that these APIs are available to other applications and even business partners. This means that the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud is entirely managed by the SAP S/4HANA cloud – wherein, organisations no longer have to log on to the embedded analytics cloud separately.

*ABAP CDS views: For the unversed, a CDS view is defined for database tables and views that are already existing in the ABAP dictionary, using the ABAP CDS statement DEFINE VIEW. A CDS view helps define the structure of an SQL view while representing a projection onto one or several dictionary tables or views.

4. Benefits of SAP Analytics Cloud in S/4HANA

Using an SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics helps your organisation in numerous ways. Below mentioned are some of the advantages – 

4.1 Get valuable insights

Integrating your S/4HANA cloud with SAP Analytics Cloud helps combine analytics, planning, and execution. It helps bring together cutting-edge technology into a single solution, which helps enable:

4.1.1 – Business intelligence: Leverage the benefits of automated, self-service insights, which helps answer business questions, detect patterns and trends, and forecast potential outcomes.  

4.1.2 – Augmented and predictive analytics: By integrating the SAP Analytics Cloud in S/4HANA cloud, organisations can get hidden insights with artificial intelligence and machine learning. It helps structure capabilities such as automated data exploration, natural-language interaction, detection of data correlations, and predictive planning.  

4.1.3 – Extended planning and analysis: Streamline your operations by linking plans across the enterprise that helps in better collaboration and leverage the benefit of essential business semantics like currency conversion and account logic.

4.2 Live data connection

SAP Analytics Cloud and S/4HANA share data online, with the former linking live to S/4HANA. Therefore, any modification made to data is instantly reflected in SAP Analytics Cloud. The advantage of doing this helps to ensure that data remains secure in the source system. Additionally, any versions you currently have can be directly used by SAP Analytics Cloud to create visualisation and analysis stories without replicating the data.

4.3 Integrate third-party data sources

Apart from providing live connectivity with SAP S/4HANA, SAP Analytics Cloud also enables integrating SAP and third-party (non-SAP) data sources. It lets organisations gain a harmonised view of all the data sources while enabling enterprise-wide monitoring of KPI’s and operational performance.

4.4 Increase your organisation’s ROI

One of the most important advantages of integrating SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP S/4HANA is that it improves your organisation’s ROI for the investments you make in the SAP software. It also has real-time access to data, where you can run analytics on the latest data and stay on par with the ever-changing commercial environment.

4.5 Advanced modelling abilities

You can govern and customise your data using SAP Analytics Cloud’s enduring modelling capabilities that are compatible with SAP S/4HANA. It helps you clean up your data using modelling tools to get a more accurate analysis. Also, you can create hierarchy tables with multiple levels, use complex algorithms and aggregates, convert currencies, rectify faults on a wide scale, and much more.

5. The final word

To stay ahead of the competitors in today’s time, it is essential for businesses to analyse changes and trends well in advance. With SAP Analytics Clouds, businesses can minimise their crisis impact to a great extent. That said, to migrate to S/4HANA, data preparation and management are necessary aspects. TJC Group comes with decades of expertise in data management, helping organisations reduce the complexity, total cost, and duration of their SAP S/4HANA migration projects. We provide consulting and SAP-certified software solutions to optimise data volume management. A few of our effective data management solutions include – 

5.1 SAP data archiving

Achieve a minimum 95% data archiving ratio by automating with TJC Group’s Archiving Session Cockpit (ASC) software. With us, you can also go one step further and achieve a 100% archiving ratio, removing all data associated with obsolete organisations.

5.2 Decommissioning of legacy systems

Retire legacy data that you do not want to migrate to S/4HANA but must retain for legal and audit reasons. Our cloud-based application, ELSA, helps you re-access the retired legacy data at any given time.

5.3 SAP ILM & GDPR data management

Manage data lifecycles from creation to retention and ultimate destruction while complying with international data privacy laws with TJC Group’s SAP ILM & GDPR solution. We help organisations define rules and policies reflecting where data is stored, how long data is retained, and when it can be destroyed. 

Interested to partner with us and get your data managed? Contact us today!