SAP Business Community for SAP xApp Analytics

Thanks to all of you who have written so enthusiastically and asked for further information about SAP xApp Analytics. SAP Business Community is offering a dedicated area specifically for SAP Analytics. You'll benefit from the following:

Webcasts & Online Demos
View Webcast replays, download slides, and read transcripts from presentations about SAP Analytics. Plus, view a demo and see how your employees can use SAP Analytics to make smart decisions, take fast action, and achieve strategic goals.

Discussion Forum
Participate in interesting and informative discussions, ask questions, and share advice about SAP Analytics.

Blogs
Hear from SAP Executive Board members, who offer insight into why analytics are crucial to addressing today's challenges and to capitalizing on tomorrow's opportunities.

Brochures & White Papers
Read brochures and white papers that offer more detail about SAP Analytics, including an IDC white paper "Making Business Processes Dynamic by Embedding Intelligence".

News & Articles
This section features the most recent SAP press releases and news stories that provide meaningful information on SAP Analytics.

More Information on SAP Analytics
Learn more about SAP Analytics and its features & functions, business benefits, and more.

The Value of High Impact Visualization with SAP Analytics

I'm out here this week at TDWI in Las Vegas and had the opportunity to attend Stephen Few's excellent presentation on "Designing Charts to Enlighten". Stephen is an expert in data visualization and really does a great job of helping business presenters to think about how to simplify data visualization by approaching it as an act of explicit design with the intent of delivering the right message to its recipients. For example, I would not have thought of this, but even something as simple as line types (thick versus thin) can convey the importance of the elements they represent. He offers a number of examples of better versus worse design principles on his website which are well worth checking out.

This bring up the more important point of the value of the quality of visualization in general and it is particularly pertinent to my current employer. SAP has long been associated with many positives in software industry in terms of comprehensiveness of functionality, industry-specific business process logic, etc., but the visuals of our UI were never really a focus of our efforts until very recently. This has given our software the reputation of being very difficult to use, and it's well-earned. It is an incredible shame from a business standpoint that SAP offers some of the most comprehensive application functionality on the planet, yet many customers have refused to use the functionality because they don't find it user-friendly.

I'm happy to say that we are starting to really "get it" however and have made and will continue to make a lot of improvements in our software via the paradigm of what we call "user-centered design". You can read about it at the SAP Design Guild, which is a great resource for UI designers. Of specific note to BI however, is that we realized that customers had so much valuable SAP data in their existing environments that they would love to be able to distribute to a MUCH wider-variety of folks. I'm not talking about the users who know the difference between a "dimension" and a "measure" or who want "multidimensional slice and dice with unbalanced hierarchies." We and a number of our partners already have great tools for this type of user.

But what nobody else in our industry aside from SAP is offering are analytical applications geared towards the common business user, the folks who really don't know and don't care to know about "dimensions" and "measures". But what they do understand are intuitive visualizations like charts and gauges, and they definitely understand their business processes. If they could be provided with applications that fused analytical content with the operations they perform in their transactional systems in a highly intuitive way, wouldn't they be far more productive? We think so, and this is the promise of our analytical applications, SAP Analytics.

Check out the application below, which we lovingly refer to as the "Blocked Order List":

This is an analytical application for a credit manager. As part of her job, she has to decide whether customers whose credit is exceeeded should be allowed to have their orders go through. See any "dimensions" or "measures"? See a separate "report tab" and an "action-link" back to the transactional system to actually conduct the transaction? No! It's all here, right on this screen. All the analytical and transactional data that the credit manager needs to make a good business decision appears in a very user-friendly manner along with three buttons that actually allow her to make the decision right there on the spot. How much training do you think it would take any credit manager to use this application? How about five minutes? And yet, how much better would her decisions be if she actually made them with this information right at her fingertips? This is the power of our analytical applications, and we are only getting started.

If you are tired of developing or having your staff develop reports that sit in people's inboxes or on their portal screens or even worse, are never used at all, then you owe it to yourself to check out SAP Analytics!

Introducing SAP Analytics - Process-Based, Composite Analytical Applications

Dear Readers,

I must apologize for not blogging in a whole month. A lot has changed in that time! I am pleased to share with all of my readers that I have recently joined SAP Labs, LLC as Director, Solution Marketing for SAP Analytics and am very excited to share some of what we are doing with you.

What is SAP Analytics? SAP Analytics is a suite of composite applications built on the SAP NetWeaver platform to enable seamless integration of analysis, transactions, and collaborative steps across the entire value network. For as many years as I was a consultant, I wondered why reporting, OLAP, analysis, etc. were disconnected from the CRM and ERP applications that business users worked on all day. If I were a sales rep working on my pipeline, couldn't I do a much better job if I had access to aggregated, analytical information with important sales KPIs in the same place that I kept my opportunity list? Wouldn't I be more likely to take the appropriate action, like moving my high value deal with a high close probability to the top of my priority list, if I had this rich insight right in front of me?

This is the premise of SAP Analytics. While no one questions the value of a stand-alone report or ad hoc analysis conducted using a BI tool, we believe that it can be even more valuable to the business users to gain analytical insight at the exact moment when they need it the most: at the point where they make their decisions. So, in keeping with NetWeaver and Enterprise Services Architecture, we're breaking down the traditional functional application barriers between ERP and CRM and BI and CPM, and giving business users the opportunity to use the most relevant, actionable analytical information we can provide them in the form of composite applications. Take a look at one of the screenshots below of a category promotion analysis application:

The graphical richness and interactivity of SAP Analytics is provided by our partnership with Macromedia (now Adobe), where we are leveraging the rich internet applications technology of their Flex product line. Even cooler, these applications can be constructed very easily by business users using the model-driven approach of our Visual Composer technology.

I will be writing about these technologies and many other things in much more detail in the coming months. I look forward to sharing more with you. In the meanwhile, I encourage you to take a look at the following link on the SAP.com website to learn more:

http://www.sap.com/analytics

Best Regards,

Nenshad Bardoliwalla

Automated Methods of Semantic Reconciliation of Structured Enterprise Data Sources

One of the biggest difficulties in building enterprise-wide data warehouses is assembling logical models of entities sourced from the data within ERP/SCM/CRM/BPM schemas, where the same entity (e.g. customer, product, employee) exists in multiple locations. In any given corporation, there are extraordinarily few, if any, individuals who know the details of more than one of the underlying schemas. For example, I may know where the customer data in a Siebel CRM system is held, but I would not have any idea where this is held in Oracle Financials or SAP R/3. To enable BI application construction where data is sourced from multiple transactional systems, vendors will have to lower the barrier to building an enterprise-wide information model, otherwise I don’t believe it will be adopted. The paper below discusses the challenges in accomplishing this, which are substantial, but there is tremendous room for innovation here that is necessary to make enterprise-wide performance management feasible.

An excellent article from ACM Queue discusses some recent research in this area that shows some promise for making this crucial task much easier:

Making heterogeneous schemas play nicely together has challenged computer
scientists for years, but we're on the path to better behavior.

Reconciling the vocabularies of different data sources is also the subject of the thesis by Dr. AnHai Doan which won the 2003 ACM's Prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Award. It's a fascinating read.

Semantic Unification of Business Information Systems

Business Information Systems continue to grow increasingly powerful as we become better at being able to represent the various types of information in the enterprise. The walls between performance management, content management, knowledge management, and business process management, will continue to crumble in the next couple of years as enterprises realize the strategic value of developing information models that leverage all of these technologies to form rich information tapestries within which the fabric of good decisions can be woven. Whether one considers a relational or multidimensional database, all the documents in a content management system, all of the data being passed through web services, or the trillions of web pages available, it seems obvious that there is value in developing semantic models that can unify the understanding of this data across these various domains.

While there is a lot of research and implementation of techniques of semantic integration of metadata stored in relational databases used by performance management vendors (e.g. CWM, or the Common Warehouse Metamodel), there is definitely a renewed interest in standards-based metadata representations of web content, leading to the "semantic web". Naveen Balani presents a very thorough overview of the semantic web that is well worth reading in his article on IBM's Developer Works entitled, "The future of the Web is Semantic".

The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. You can think of the Semantic Web as an efficient way to represent data on the World Wide Web, or as a database that is globally linked, in a manner understandable by machines, to the content of documents on the Web. Semantic technologies represent meaning using ontologies and provide reasoning through the relationships, rules, logic, and conditions represented in those ontologies.