Why you need to know what SAC is…
SAC is a Business Analytics tool, but before I tell you more about SAC, let’s start out by having a look at the definition of Business Analytics. Gartner defines it as follows:
Business analytics is comprised of solutions used to build analysis models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities and predict future states.
Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics and statistics, and is delivered as an application suitable for a business user. These analytics solutions often come with prebuilt industry content that is targeted at an industry business process.
To rephrase – Business Analytics is about creating data models and using these models to analyse the current state, explain what is causing the current state and try to predict what will happen in the future. Another key element in Gartner’s definition is, that Business Analytics is often delivered in an application, that is suitable for a business user.
Having the business user as the main driver of Business Analytics is a fairly new development, that has accelerated over the past 1-2 years. So being able to deliver a user-friendly Business Analytics application that covers the areas mentioned above, is crucial to the success of all BI vendors.
SAP’s key offering in the Business Analytics area going forward will be SAC, i.e SAP Analytics Cloud. SAC covers all the areas mentioned above in a very user-friendly way and it also includes Planning capabilities for e.g. Financial Planning. There are other vendors in the market, who can deliver the individual components, but no one can deliver an integrated solution covering BI, Predictive and Planning – in one tool.
The fact that SAC has a unique offering is one reason why you need to know what SAC is.
However, there is another important element to why you should know what SAC is. SAC will not only be used as a traditional BI front-end tool but will also be embedded in many of SAP’s other cloud applications, like SuccessFactors, Ariba and Concur. In these other products, SAC will gradually replace the built-in reporting capabilities. This means that even though you are not working directly within Business Analytics – you will probably run into SAP Analytics Cloud in one way or the other.
At NTT DATA Business Solutions, we are therefore investing heavily in SAC within all areas of our business and we have already assisted our customers in many successful SAC implementations. However, we also realize there’s a need for preconfigured content that helps customers accelerate the implementation of SAC and hereby the realization of the associated benefits of SAC.
SAP already provides standard Business Content within a number of Industries and LoB’s (the complete list is available here: https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/learning/business-content/). Even though extensive, the Business Content does not cover all and that is why we, at NTT DATA Business Solutions, have started developing 3rd Party Business Content and SAP Qualified Packages for SAC.
The 3rd party business content is available for free and can be downloaded and installed directly from within SAC. The SAP Qualified Packages can be found and bought on the SAP App Center.
In this blog, I will highlight two of the SAP Qualified packages we at NTT DATA Business Solutions have developed – the SAC Starter Package and the CxO Dashboards.
The SAC Starter Package consists of three stories within Finance (and the underlying models). The stories included are the following:
- Profit & Loss
- Balance Sheet
- Financial Performance
Furthermore, the package includes:
- SAC Licenses for 10 BI/Predictive users
- Training of users
- Data model integration of stories
The Starter Package will provide almost instant value due to the fact that it’s based on best practices, contains advanced visualizations and contains everything you need in order to get up and running with SAC.
In order to learn more about the SAC Starter Package please use the following link: https://www.sapappcenter.com/apps/36517/sac-starter-pack#!overview
The CxO Dashboards is an accelerator containing standard dashboards and KPI’s for CxO’s that will give real-time insight into key business metrics. The characteristics of the CxO Dashboards are as follows:
- Four dashboards (CEO, CFO, Sales, Manufacturing) with 10 KPIs each
- Runs on SAP Analytics Cloud (or SAP BusinessObjects) & integrates with SAP S/4HANA for real-time analytics
- Simple and intuitive usage with graphical visualizations
- High performance using power of SAP HANA
- Flexible parameters for adapting to client’s data
- Rapid Implementation
The detailed content of the dashboards is shown in the figure below:
Once implemented, the CxO dashboards will help drive value based on the following aspects:
Power of Cloud
- Faster return on investment (ROI)
- Increased business agility and lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Governance, security and transformation
Rapid Implementation
- Preconfigured ready to deploy packaged solution
- It can be bundled as a part of SAP S/4HANA implementation
- Go-Live in matter of weeks, not months/years
Modern Architecture
- Real-time high-performance analytics based on SAP HANA in-memory platform
- Simplified architecture with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA
- Mobile ready and intuitive dashboards
In order to learn more about the CxO Dashboards please use the following link: https://www.sap.com/india/partner/partner-package-finder/itelligence-india-software-solutions-it-analytics-cxo-dashboard.html
If you would like to know more about our offerings within SAP Analytics Cloud or Data & Analytics in general, feel free to reach out to me – Jacob Orup Lund, Head of Global Digital Practice – Business Analytics at [email protected].