SAP Analytics Cloud: How does it work?

Collecting data is no longer sufficient. To secure a place in an increasingly competitive market, companies must transform the thousands of available data points into relevant insights to identify risks and opportunities. They then need modern tools capable of performing predictive analytics, modeling data, simplifying report generation, and more. All this is possible with SAP Analytics Cloud. Discover this solution.

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

Formerly known as SAP BusinessObjects Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud (or SAC) is a Business Intelligence, enterprise planning, and predictive analytics solution. It offers a range of advanced features that empower you to make better decisions based on data. Powered by and artificial intelligence, this tool enables companies to automate reports, uncover hidden information, develop business plans, and predict insights. Thus, SAC is more than just an analytics tool that facilitates data visualization and report generation. By leveraging AI, SAP Analytics Cloud enhances strategic business planning, allowing organizations to gain a competitive edge.

What are the features of SAP Analytics Cloud?

SAP Analytics Cloud serves as a comprehensive cloud platform for Business Intelligence (BI), planning, and predictive analytics. This is reflected in its diverse features.

Data Access and Integration

Even before starting any analyses, SAP Analytics Cloud collects your data, regardless of its origin. The platform connects to various on-premise and cloud data sources, including relational databases, flat files, web sources, and cloud applications. As for SAP products, such as SAP HANA, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA, they benefit from native integration. After collecting the data, SAC cleans, transforms, and enriches your data.

Visualization and Reporting

As a Business Intelligence tool, SAP Analytics Cloud offers a wide range of data visualizations, such as:

• charts,
• maps,
• pivot tables, and more.

These data visualization tools will complement your dashboards and interactive reports. Thanks to the intuitive drag-and-drop interface, these reports can be created by both data experts and business experts. But most importantly, the data becomes understandable to all, regardless of their level of technical expertise. Decision-makers, marketers, accountants, financial controllers, human resources managers, and others can now make data-driven decisions.

Data Analysis and Exploration

SAP Analytics Cloud boasts enhanced analytical capabilities. For example:

• Search to Insight: to get quick answers via natural language queries.
• Smart Insights: to gain additional information on a specific data point.
• Smart Discovery: to explore your data and uncover new relationships, hidden patterns, or outliers.
• Smart Predict: to identify trends, make forecasts, and generate insights.

Additionally, these tools are very easy to use thanks to AI integration. Similar to generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Mistral AI, you just need to ask simple questions to get instant results.

Planning and Modeling

The strength of SAP Analytics Cloud lies in its planning and modeling features, particularly in finance. They enable the ability to:

• create and manage financial and operational plans;
• simulate different scenarios and analyze the impact of business changes;
• consolidate financial data from different sources.

That said, all departments can benefit from planning and modeling. These are just the main features of SAP Analytics Cloud. You will also find collaborative tools, single sign-on (SSO) to enhance data security, pre-built applications, and more. Want to go further with data tools? Get trained with Liora.