Leveraging the Power of SAP Data and Analytics Solutions

All businesses run on data. To run better, every business – from the convenience store to the multinational organization – needs to be analytic and insightful.

Enterprise analytics ultimately sit on top of an ERP system and other enterprise applications data, whether integrated with such a system or not (except for tightly scoped projects on the sideline). If your analytics aren’t built on your up-to-date ERP data, then they’re not analyzing your immediate business. Instead, your analytics are providing a reduced, commodified, and ultimately restricted version of what the analyst wants to see. This disconnect from the real business is even more apparent when it comes to planning. 

PLANNING AND ANALYTICS WITH SAP

To be effective, analytics and planning need to be closely coupled with your business system. This can help you track the changing dynamics of your business, but also integrate planning and analytics with execution. Extended planning and analysis capabilities within SAP data and analytics solutions provide simulation, predictions, and comprehensive business-focused features, which work across the enterprise with authoritative data and your existing, trusted business processes. 

Planning is an analytic process. You must build plans on the foundation of business understanding to be credible. But plans must also be integrated with your business processes to be effective and analytical to be insightful. Inevitably, planning is highly collaborative, requiring an exchange of inputs and analyses across numerous teams. This process is demanding and time-consuming for a good reason: the future is at stake.  

With these challenges, it’s even more difficult to build a mission-critical, integrated stack. As data is moved around for varied purposes, you create silos of technologies and teams at variance with each other in a complex integration landscape. The overall architecture is fragile and risky.  

Mission-critical systems require high availability and disaster recovery built in across lines of business and practices. You need real elasticity in storage and computing to support unpredictable workloads. The more moving parts to your architecture, the more difficult this becomes. 

BRING YOUR TECHNOLOGY TO YOUR DATA

There’s a better way to derive value from your data than losing context and insight in a new system. It’s a way that also brings advantages in governance, management, and resilience. 

Data and analytics solutions from SAP enable you to bring a wide range of advanced technologies directly to your mission-critical, trusted data – the data you’ve already invested in that supports your most impactful decisions. The analytics capabilities of the SAP Analytics Cloud solution are complete with operational and management reporting, business intelligence, machine learning and augmented analytics, planning, simulation, and forecasting. Rather than extracting data, you can either use these capabilities or integrate third-party applications into the SAP infrastructure. 

You can provide smooth and scalable access to data without duplication with a data management architecture that focuses on delivering an integrated, semantically rich data layer over underlying data landscapes. The SAP Datasphere solution enables organizations to create a business data fabric that unleashes the power of meaningful data to each data consumer – with business context and logic intact. SAP Datasphere is a comprehensive data solution that unifies data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation, and data virtualization. SAP HANA Cloud provides the trusted foundation for modern applications and analytics. 

For organizations, the value of the business data fabric is the simplified delivery of authoritative data, in business terms, to consumers across highly distributed data landscapes. It unleashes the rapid creation of intelligent data applications and the quick formation of new analytics and planning projects, so organizations can derive more business value from data assets. 

SAP DATA AND ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS

SAP solutions enable true closed-loop decision-making, from asking basic questions all the way through visualization, collaboration, data storytelling, forecasting, planning, and then taking action directly in your core business systems. You don’t need to choose between agility and governance because those conflicts don’t arise. 

Taken together, you can meet your enterprise analysis and planning needs within the SAP software ecosystem without the complexity or cost of integrating other platforms. Just as importantly, your data is governed by the same trust you’ve placed in your ERP system. There’s no loss of context, conflicting models, or incomplete metadata. Your analysis and planning are living elements of your business. 

To learn more about leveraging the power of data and analytics with SAP to drive business transformation and more informed decision-making, contact our team today. 

This insight was provided by SAP for value-added resellers like Crescense. Contact our team for more information on SAP solutions for midsized wholesale distributors today.