Book review: SAP Analytics Cloud – Financial Planning and Analysis (SAP Press)

Another review on yet another SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) book? Oh yes! This time I read SAP Analytics Cloud – Financial Planning and Analysis, again by SAP Press, and I was very glad to see this 450+ pages strong book on SAC Planning being announced some time ago. 

Few may know that planning is actually the original pillar that SAC was built on. Back in 2015, the very first version of SAC was called SAP Cloud for Planning and it was aimed at being a pure SaaS planning solution! Nowadays the focus of most users may be on reporting and analytics in SAC stories and applications, using the live data connections instead of acquired data models, but still plannings is an important part of SAC. So I think it’s good to have a dedicated book for this, especially as certain SAC planning concepts are completely different from the reporting and analytics side of SAC. Think of designing and managing acquired planning models vs. using live models, working with different data versions, planning-specific features as data actions, allocations, using the built-in calendar, etc.

What I like is that not just the technical options are listed in this book, but also the overall processes in financial planning are introduced and explained. What are we actually trying to achieve here, who is involved and what are the steps? This makes it so much easier to grasp the concepts and (technical) solutions that are offered in SAC. By the way, the sales planning sample scenario that is used throughout the book is based one of the business content packages for SAC: Sales Planning for SAP S/4HANA Cloud (SAP Best Practices). Unfortunately I only figured this out after going through almost the full book, as only at the very end there is a chapter on several business content samples. But it could be helpful if you’d want to try a couple of things yourself, without having to build up a complete model first, load the data etc.

Read More

Book review: Designing Dashboards with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAP Press)

Developing dashboards and reports with SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) does not only require skills on using the tool itself, but also some fundamental knowledge on how to design a dashboard and how to communicate data in a proper way. Of course, there are already some good books and resources on how to work with SAC and we have numerous books on dashboard design and concepts as IBCS. This book by SAP Press – Designing Dashboards with SAP Analytics Cloud – aims to bridge these two topics and bring these theoretical design concepts into practice in SAC.

The book starts with some pretty extensive chapters on dashboard design principles (they define their “10 golden rules”) and process-related success factors, from understanding the user requirements till measuring the success of dashboard after deployment. It’s a bit dry to read (lots of text) but it definitely contains some interesting stuff, especially if you’re pretty new to this. 

The majority of the book leads you through the practical side of these fundamentals with a series of sample scenarios. We get lots of screenshots and lots of different visualization types (charts). It not only shows you what is possible, but also how to achieve this in SAC in a step-by-step manner. However, I don’t really understand why the authors chose to split the scenarios (and chapters) by for example connectivity type (acquired vs live). It shouldn’t really matter where the data comes from to design a good dashboard, right? Anyway, it at least gives us some more examples to learn from. 

Read More

Dashboards are dead? Really?

I saw this nice discussion on LinkedIn last week on the state of dashboarding. And yes, I was as surprised as you to see a relevant, professional post on this platform in 2022, as LinkedIn has turned into some sort of Facebook lately, but okay… 😅  

The premise of the post was that dashboarding has gone completely out of hand: everybody now creates his own version of the truth with all these modern easy-to-use tools. An interesting memo by ThoughtSpot called Dashboards are dead was included with some thoughts on a different approach for data analysis. The ThoughtSpot solution is driven by natural language search (NLS) and artificial intelligence (AI) and it actually ranks pretty high on the Gartner Quadrant for Analytics and BI. This is actually a very current topic as SAP acquired Askdata last week! Askdata also operates in this area and can be expected to further extend the “Search to Insight” capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud.  

Time wasted

Although this “Dashboards are dead” document by ThoughtSpot is obviously created for marketing, it does give some interesting insights on how dashboarding and reporting is approached, especially in the world outside of our SAP bubble. Some comments made me scratch my head though. One of the narratives here is that although we have all these fancy dashboards now, still a lot of time is wasted in keeping them up to date with proper data (chapter 3). I actually do recognize this from some projects where we were asked to rebuild/develop some PowerBI solution that had grown out of hand and indeed couldn’t be maintained anymore. But, I absolutely don’t agree that this is because of the tools that are used. 

Read More

Book review: Security for SAP Analytics Cloud – Authorizations and Provisioning

It’s been a while since I reviewed some SAP related books here at HackingSAP.com and what better way to pick this up again than with a book on SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) that was even written by my very own Interdobs colleague Martijn van Foeken! 

Security for SAP Analytics Cloud – Authorizations and Provisioning is a so called SAP Press E-Bites. These are digital-only (PDF, ePub, online) books on specific topics and tasks, with a length of around 100 pages.

The configuration of your SAC platform is (hopefully) something you do only at the start of a new SAC implementation and – if properly done – take advantage of for years after. For authorizations this means that you design and apply a solid authorization setup and only need to extend this with additional folders and/or teams whenever this is necessary. That’s what this book will help you with. 

Martijn walks you through the steps of managing users, teams, roles, folders and other SAC objects that users can create. He shows you how to do all this manually within the SAC platform itself, but also how to move the whole user management completely out of SAC by connecting the SAC tenant to a custom Identity Provider (IDP). Microsoft Azure is often used for this and is therefor also used as an example in the book. With such a setup we can for example let users login with their Microsoft credentials and let the system automatically generate a SAC account when a new user logs in for the first time. Martijn also describes how to assign users to teams and roles by using SAML attribute mapping. With this you can use security groups in your custom IDP to manage team and role memberships in SAC. The book ends with a chapter on automated (mass) user and team provisioning via a REST API. 

So in conclusion, this E-Bite is a quick read on SAC authorizations and it will give you a good understanding of what is possible and how to apply the various options in a step-by-step manner. As this is a very fundamental topic for a successful implementation of SAC, but probably not something you work at on a daily base, this E-Bite is definitely something to check out if you want to get up to speed fast!

Security for SAP Analytics Cloud: Authorizations and Provisioning
Martijn van Foeken
98 pages, E-book formats: EPUB, MOBI, PDF, online
ISBN 978-1-4932-2254-4

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2022

It’s that time of the year again: Gartner just published its holy Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence (ABI) Platforms for 2022! Our beloved SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP’s offering in this area and is compared to tools as PowerBI (Microsoft), Tableau (SalesForce) and Qlik.

Status Quo?

When I look at the sections in the report for these four players I’m surprised how little has changed since the 2021 quadrant. I could basically just repeat most of the comments that I wrote in last year’s blog here.

Microsoft is still the top leader with PowerBI, Tableau is a strong number 2 and even Qlik is still regarded as a “leader”. Besides the (obvious) ability to deliver a proper technical solution, PowerBI and Tableau already have a very high adoption and with their extremely rich and active user communities it is very unlikely that they will loose this position any time soon. On that topic, SAP is still paying for trashing their (BOBJ) community years ago and has to build this back up from scratch. Fortunately, I do see that SAP is actually showing some very good progress on this and it is definitely going into the right direction again (I’m still not a fan of the community site in its current form though, but that’s another topic).

Read More