SAP Data & Analytics Newsflash
Mark Henning Mrosek
Global Lead Business Planning & Analytics | Global Lead Sustainability Services bei Westernacher Consulting
Welcome to our monthly newsletter about SAP Data & Analytics published by Westernacher Consulting. Westernacher Consulting is a global consultancy specializing in SAP consulting. Stay informed on SAP Data & Analytics news, read insightful articles and find out what we have been up to.
Is Excel the most dangerous software on the planet?
How to modernize your Financial Planning and avoid the pitfalls of MS Excel
Back in 2013, Forbes magazine ran an article titled "Microsoft's Excel might be the most dangerous software on the planet." - you can read it here.?
Forbes argued that Excel could be the most dangerous software, more dangerous even than rouge or malicious code. Its pervasiveness in the business world and increasing complexity together with the way spreadsheets are handled in a slapdash manner results in a situation that no one is on top of it anymore. Switzerland based Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and Financial Services Authority in the UK have voiced concerns about the use of spreadsheets and manual processes in the banking and insurance industries. However, it’s a cross-industry problem as most companies use Excel and the premise of the Forbes article still rings true today as it did a decade ago. A study showed that 88% of all spreadsheets contain one or more serious errors (link to article).
How much damage could a humble Excel error do? – I hear you ask. After all its just spreadsheets, right? Well, it's more complicated than that – businesses make decisions based on the numbers in spreadsheets. Those decisions have real world consequences.
Not convinced yet?
·????? JP Morgan Chase lost over $6 Billion dollars (yes, that's really a B) due to a mistake in an Excel formula (link to article).
·????? TransAlta lost $24 million due to an Excel copy-&-paste error (link to article).
·????? Kodak lost $11 million due to an Excel typo error (link to article).
·????? Barclays Capital spent millions of dollars on worthless contracts due to an Excel reformatting error (link to article).
There are many known examples and likely several unknown ones.
The point is, doing things manually in Excel is risky!
What is one of the most common uses of Excel by companies? Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A).
Believe it or not, many companies are still using Microsoft Excel as their primary tool for financial planning and analytics (FP&A). Studies show that a substantial 40% of companies rely on Excel for their planning (BARC 2010, Deloitte 2014). According to this BARC study, 80% of the companies that they identified as 'best-in-class' used specialized software for FP&A whereas 40% of the companies that they identified as 'laggards' still used Excel.
Excel may well be a popular tool, but it is limited. Consolidating plans across your organization, performing complex collaborative planning or implementing scenarios for top management soon become struggles. Unsurprisingly, much valuable time is consumed in doing so, and errors abound. Indeed, financial planning in Excel results in up to 25% more effort than with modern planning applications (BARC, 2010).
What would such an alternative look like? Check out our article on this here.
?Data Security in SAP Datasphere demystified!
A Westernacher technical blog about Data Access Control in SAP Datasphere
Welcome to the world of SAP Datasphere, where data is not just information – it’s the lifeblood of modern business. In this landscape, maintaining the sanctity of data is paramount, and that is where the silent guardians, the Data Access Controls (DAC), come into play.
Data Access Controls in SAP Datasphere help manage the access rights of users. They make sure your information stays safe and correct. As more data is created and shared, it is of highest importance to have strong rules to keep sensitive info safe from people who shouldn’t see it. In this blog, we will talk about why these controls matter, how they help, and why they are vital for keeping your data secure. However, the various scenarios and the way they work is generally not very clear for many people. This great blog by our very own Dilan Ballikaya ?? helps demystify DACs and shows how to use them with a diverse range of scenarios.
A rather 'lite version' of the data model described in the SAP blog titled “SAP Datasphere Analytic Model Series – Data Model Introduction” is used. The dataset mentioned and shared in the SAP blog is available here. With this you can test and analyse the effectiveness of different scenarios within different contexts. Check out the scenarios and gain insights into the diverse outcomes they produce and understand how the Data Access Control works.
Check out the full blog here.
Are you using SAP Datasphere at your organization or considering getting it? We can help. Contact us here.?
Operational Insights at the point of decision
How business users can leverage SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics to make data-driven decisions
One thing common to business users from various different LOBs like Sales, Procurement, Production, Supply Chain or Finance is that they all make several operational decisions throughout their day. The quality and speed of these operational decisions when aggregated across the entire organization can often be the deciding factor in whether the company is operationally efficient.
Traditionally, Business Intelligence was delivered with dedicated BI tools and accessing the data often meant leaving the transactional application and opening up a BI application. While there is still a genuine need for dedicated BI applications, there are analytic use cases that could be moved closer to where the operational decisions are taken i.e. in the transactional system. This is precisely what SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics aims to do.
Embedded Analytics is an umbrella term used to refer to a collection of analytics capabilities built-into SAP S/4HANA. This includes Fiori Apps, Multi-Dimensional Reports and a mini version of SAP Analytics Cloud called Embedded SAC.
With SAP S/4HANA, all the benefits of an in-memory database with columnar storage enabled new possibilities for operational analytics. Data no longer needs to be replicated and stored via overnight batch loads. The same transactional system can also support operational analytical use cases to deliver real time insights at the point of decision without leaving the transactional system.
SAP provides a vast library of CDS views which form the Virtual Data Model (a layered approach to building a data model without persisting data in each layer). While many standard Fiori Apps and reports are available out of the box, it is very easy to create new ones using the vast library of standard CDS views. This means, business users can create their own reports with ease and access them via a time just like they would access any other transactional app.
Benefits of SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics:
- Real time visibility into the operational data
- Transactions & analytics within a single system for closed loop scenarios
- Self-service capabilities supported by a vast library of standard CDS views
- No additional license costs?
If you are a business user who wants to leverage the SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics to supercharge your operational efficiency but don't know where to start – check out this great free course that shows you the ropes in around 2 hours.
If you want to get the most out of your SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics or wish to go for a full fledge Enterprise SAP Analytics Cloud implementation, Westernacher can help! Reach out to us here.
?What’s new in SAP Analytics Cloud?
Highlights from the recent quarterly release
The Q1 2024 update contains several new features and improvements across all aspects of SAC. Here are the top 5 features.
1)??? JustAsk – a next generation natural language query powered by AI is finally here. Pick a model and just ask your questions. Note that this only works with acquired data models. Fine tune JustAsk by enriching the models with semantic data like synonyms for measures, dimension members, suggested questions etc.
2)??? Flexible Data Model – modelling with the new model type has been even more flexible. We can choose to create a blank model or start with a dataset. Fields can now be modelled as just single columns without any dimension table or master data behind it. Several other modeling features have been added.
3)??? Disaggregation based on another measure – the standard disaggregation behavior for a measure uses the same measure as the driver, but now you can also select a different measure to act as the driver for disaggregating a measure. This opens up a lot of new scenarios that were either not possible before or would have required complex data actions to code.
4)??? Calendar integration with MS Office – calendar tasks in SAC can now be integrated to show up in the Outlook or Teams calendar. Any changes made in SAC automatically reflect in Office. This will make Planning workflows so much more accessible as users will be able to jump to their tasks right from their Outlook/Teams calendar entries.
5)??? Data Analyzer Formula Editor – it us now possible to create formulas in the Data Analyzer using the new Formula Editor. This greatly improves the self-service adhoc analysis capabilities of the Data Analyzer.
To see these new features in action – check out the highlights video by Orla Cullen that covers the top 5 features in under 10 mins.
领英推荐
Check out this detailed blog by Megan Hoy for details about all the new features that make up the Q1 2024 QRC. You can check out many of the features in this highly detailed video by Orla Cullen. Use the timestamps to jump to the feature you are interested in.
Westernacher Planning & Analytics Forum 2024
A summary of the event held on 29th Feb
If you missed our event “Planning & Analytics Forum 2024”, then we’re here to catch you up on the highlights. We had a compelling event packed with insightful sessions by our own architects together with SAP and our customers.
Access the event recordings from our website here or use the session specific links below. The event is in German, but you can use the sub-titles with auto-translate feature on YouTube to follow the conversations. We promise you they are worth it!
Watch: The future of SAP Analytics Cloud: AI as an innovation driver for modern BI.
Jürgen Bauer ?| Head of Customer Advisory BI & Planning, SAP
Claudia Q. ?| Solution Architect, Westernacher Consulting
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Watch: Smart decisions: Thalia’s BI transformation with SAP BW/4HANA and Analytics Cloud.
Tobias Ruschepaul ?| Head of BI & Analytics, Thalia
Claudia Q. ?| Solution Architect, Westernacher Consulting
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Watch: SAP Datasphere – An opportunity for companies to reorganize themselves
Fabian Hartje | Head of Product Management SAP Datasphere, SAP
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Watch: The next step after BW 7.5 to BW/4HANA or Datasphere?
Dr. Russell Sadd | Practice Lead DACH, Business Planning and Analytics, Westernacher Consulting
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Watch: Roundtable – AI in Analytics.
Jürgen Bauer | Head of Customer Advisory BI & Planning, SAP
Dr. Russell Sadd | Practice Lead DACH, Business Planning and Analytics, Westernacher Consulting
Fabian Hartje | Head of Product Management SAP Datasphere, SAP
Highlights from the SAP Data Unleased 2024 event
Top 5 announcements you should know about
The SAP Data Unleashed 2024 event was packed full of exciting announcements from SAP. If you missed the event, here’s a quick summary.
Customers like Bosch Digital & HUGO BOSS shared their insights on using SAP Datasphere’s business data fabric approach and SAP Analytics Cloud to gain the edge using data.
Westernacher is proud to be involved in Hugo Boss’s data & analytics journey. We helped Hugo Boss build a cutting-edge logistics dashboard that allows them to monitor their warehouses in real-time (we call this EWM Insights). We’ve also worked with them to create compelling SAC mobile dashboards for store performance and more. Our collaboration with Hugo Boss in the analytics space is a great example of a fruitful partnership that helps our customers get more out of their data.
Here are the key announcements from SAP:
·????? Joule in SAC - SAP’s generative-AI assistant comes to SAC!
SAP is bringing the power of generative AI to planning and analytics with SAP Analytics Cloud, which provides AI-generated data exploration, automation of planning and data management tasks, and deep analysis with Joule copilot. This is enabled by vector capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud that combine the powerful capabilities of LLMs with all the relevant data of your organization — ensuring business context is a constant for generative AI outputs.
·????? AI Governance – Collibra & SAP tackle AI governance.
Incorporating generative AI across the business isn’t possible without trusted and governed data. To provide organizations with a solution to govern the policies, processes and practices of AI, SAP is announcing an expansion of their partnership with Collibra to integrate Collibra’s AI Governance with SAP data assets. This can help provide transparency and accountability for organizations and help ensure regulatory, compliance and privacy policies are met.
·????? Knowledge Graph – Discover hidden patterns across applications.
With the new SAP Datasphere knowledge graph, organizations can discover hidden insights and patterns across their applications and systems. This enables both technical and business users to deeply understand the relationships between data, metadata, and business processes, as well as boost the effectiveness of machine learning and large language models.
·????? Unified and Advanced Planning & Analytics – Plan better!
SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud integration gets even better for planning with a single flexible model. SAP Analytics Cloud planning models can be deployed into SAP Datasphere, bringing plan and actuals data together for real-time steering. Through a reduction in both data footprint and modeling efforts, SAP Analytics Cloud extends planning functionality via SAP Datasphere and its native capabilities for transformation and integration. This reduces the complexity and risk inherent in storing multiple copies of data which is prevalent today. SAP Analytics Cloud for planning will have live access to actual and plan data for extended planning and analysis scenarios, including the live usage of master data. With this, SAP Datasphere will become the platform on which planning processes and tools can integrate.
·????? SAC Compass – AI assisted Monte Carlo simulations for better planning!
SAP Analytics Cloud compass provides Monte Carlo simulation capabilities with a business user-friendly interface. This enables non-technical users to perform real-time multi-variate analysis without prior IT setup or advanced statistical skills. Users can perform business simulations directly in SAP Analytics Cloud at a fraction of the time and effort required to perform similar analysis manually. Scenario modeling capabilities will allow comparisons between assumptions, and the reporting of impact variances provides real-time insight, concept validation, and reveals the sensitivity of the drivers chosen. Now customers can identify their major drivers and combinations over time, enabling a better understanding of the dynamics between the data, and how to continuously simulate better and faster. With compass, customers can face the future with confidence.
Find out more about these new features with the articles below.
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