Sharpen Your Competitive Edge

With #itelli2019 only a few weeks away, I have been rummaging through my memory banks to find examples of where customers have turned around significant business challenges or seized new opportunities by overhauling their approach to analytics. I have encountered many such situations over recent months and years. Information allows organisations to become immensely effective and relevant in my experience; both internally and externally.

If we park the technology for a moment (and there will be plenty of that at the conference!), the essence of what we are trying to achieve is as simple as ensuring that users within (and increasingly beyond) the organisation have relevant information to drive effective decision-making. It’s through this rational process that individuals can arrive at informed judgements and avoid the perils of gut-instinct. It also means that decisions and often, entire business processes can be automated and thereby remove the mundaneness out of a given activity.

I encourage all businesses to reassess their current challenges, take stock of the current operating environment and re-imagine how information can make them more effective. There are well-established methodologies for this type of user-led design.

This approach can tease out these critical use cases and challenge inertia that may be deep seated within your organisation. Of course, our cause is immensely helped by advances in technology: cloud storage and compute, predictive modelling, augmented analytics to accompany self-service – to mention a few. All of these, when correctly deployed will ensure that the essence of a given situation is clearly and unambiguously communicated to the relevant users. This will separate the signal from the noise and ultimately allow prosperous business outcomes to flow from such analytical outputs.

My conference sessions will revolve around this theme and in particular, address two distinct communities: customers running SAP Business Applications such as ECC, S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, etc. and customers running SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform. I will be sharing my practical experiences with SAP Analytics Cloud and how this is being used to address some of the aforementioned challenges. I will include copious amounts of software demonstrations and there will be ample opportunity for questions and discussion throughout the day. We now have multiple SAP Analytics Cloud deployments underway now.

I will be making reference to these and where appropriate, introduce you to customers that are currently embarked on this journey. SAP Analytics Cloud has matured significantly over the last 18 months and consequently, we now have a very robust solution, which is capable of addressing practical business challenges. It’s also increasingly being used as a source of differentiation by providing clients (our customers’ customer) access to information. Similarly, it is a very effective medium to communicate information to suppliers and other stakeholders too.

I will be turning my hand to some embedded analytics within S/4HANA and use this to set the context for operational analytics using SAP Analytics Cloud via the CDS Views available in S/4HANA. In the SAP BusinessObjects session, I will cover off the increasingly popular hybrid use case and convey how your existing investment in BOBJ can be preserved whilst leveraging the benefits of SAP Analytics Cloud for new data discovery use cases.

You can catch my sessions at 2pm and 3:15pm in Whittle on the Third floor at #itelli2019.

Author: Asad Mahmood, Principal Solution Architect, NTT DATA Business Solutions UK