SAP Influence Portal for SAP Analytics Cloud

Posted by Xavier Hacking

One of the lesser known areas in the world of SAP is the SAP Customer Influence Program. This is a portal where SAP customers and consultants can bring up new ideas and improvements for all SAP solutions. For SAP Analytics Cloud there is a pretty lively campaign with over 3000 improvement requests.

Apparently the team behind the Influence Program is doing some major evaluations this week, as I already received numerous updates on improvement requests. 😅 Unfortunately, most of my requests are denied and set to the Not Planned status due to a lack of votes. 😔

So I thought it would be good to have another look at the Influence Portal here on the blog. Probably a lot of you have never even heard of this.

As mentioned, you can propose new features or basically any change to the tool via this Influence Program. The idea is that whenever an improvement request gets a substantial number of votes it will be reviewed by SAP and taken into consideration for a development release. Currently the threshold seems to be 15 votes from different SAP customers/partners (years ago this was only 5 votes, regardless of the customer/partner). Still, there are no guarantees that something will be included in the tool, even when there are a lot of votes. 

Let’s first have a look at some stats on the improvement requests for SAP Analytics Cloud that are already submitted. 

  • The 20 most active authors (of 914) create around 33% of all improvement requests. I saw some familiar names there. 😀
  • Most ideas are in the Visualization category (25%).
  • About 20% of the requests are delivered or already offered.
  • Less than 10% of the requests have 15 or more votes.
  • Out of the 73 requests that I submitted over the past 3 years, only 10 made the 15 vote threshold. 😱

Well, that’s not really motivating. Maybe we should have a look at some of the delivered requests. Some popular examples are regarding Zero Suppression (228970), the Android Mobile App (221133), Saving a story as a PPT (227471) and Export to Excel (202517), which is all pretty much basic stuff I’d say. 

Looking at the requests with the most votes overall, there are some familiar items on top: Change data model on live connection (229434), Create Public Dimension with Geo Location (208312) and of course the Undo and Forward button (138960).

So if you haven’t checked out the SAP Influence Program portal please give it a look and vote on the ideas that you think are useful to bring into SAP Analytics Cloud!

HackingSAP.com - Mar 19, 2021 | SAP Analytics Cloud
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1 comment

  1. Christian
    March 23, 2021

    Thanks for posting about the Influence campaign for SAP Analytics Cloud.
    Yes, beginning of the year we started to clean up old ideas that haven’t received a lot of votes from customers. While this doesn’t mean that we will never put any of them onto our product backlog, we feel that the experience will be better for customers if we are cleaning up old ideas on a regular basis going forward.
    The Influence Portal has always been an important input channel for the product team because it allows us to get direct feedback from customers and partners, and it gives everyone the same voice. With a continuously growing customer base this channel becomes more and more important for us. So please continue to submit your ideas.
    On the campaign site you should also be able to see that over the years the product team has already implemented more than 550 ideas that were submitted by our customers, therefore more than 100 alone in 2020.
    Lastly, You might also be interested to read about the ideas that were delivered as part of our latest Q1 2021 release: https://blogs.sap.com/2021/03/23/sap-analytics-cloud-customer-influence-q1-2021/
    Best regards, Christian – on behalf of the SAP Analytics Cloud product team

    Reply

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