To ensure that business operations are driven by data, stakeholders need to employ Business intelligence (BI). Modern BI tools enable an organization to make decisions that are guided not just by a small collection of relevant data, but with a complete picture of available data. BI involves many technologies and the process include organizing data, analyzing, reporting and visualization of data. BI is the answer to how a business performed in the past and why those are the outcomes that were achieved.
One of the most common ways to present BI is through data visualization. Data visualizations show data in a manner that is more accessible and understandable. Visualizations compiled into dashboards can quickly tell a story and highlight trends or patterns that may not be discovered easily when manually analyzing raw data. This enhanced accessibility facilitates more collaboration around data, thereby creating a positive impact on the business.
According to a survey by Statista last year, 27.5 percent of respondents believed cloud-based BI plays a critical role in their organization. About 50% of the survey participants agreed that cloud BI is very important for their enterprise.
All businesses benefit from understanding their data. Data visualization assists businesses in quickly identifying data trends, which would otherwise be a hassle. It branches out to all fields where data exists and helps stakeholders prolifically convey points by leveraging business information. Visualizing data enables decision-makers to interrelate it to help find better insights and drive the decision-making process. BI involves creating any type of data visualization (report, dashboard, or infographic) that provides insight into a business to initiate action or make informed decisions.
Business intelligence (BI) combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools, and infrastructure; modern business intelligence helps change, eliminates inefficiencies, and quickly adapts to market or supply changes.
Advantages of BI
- Identifies ways to increase profit
- Helps analyze customer behavior
- Compares data with competition
- Continuously tracks the performance
- Helps optimize operations
- Understand market trends
Evolving Data Needs & BI Platforms
BI is continually evolving according to business demands and technological advancements with the pressure to keep users up to date. As artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to grow; businesses can integrate insights from AI into a broader BI strategy. With growth strategies relying more on being data-driven and efforts to share data, collaboration automatically increases. Data visualization will be even more essential to work together across teams and departments across diverse industries be it retail, insurance, pharmaceuticals, or oil. BI platforms today can adapt to new technology and the innovation introduced.
Advanced business intelligence tools today combine a broad set of data analysis applications including ad hoc analysis and querying, enterprise reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), mobile BI and real-time BI. Data visualization software for designing charts as well as tools for building BI dashboards and performance scorecards that display business metrics is also included as functionalities. All of this helps churn out company data into easy-to-understand visuals.
What is SAP Analytics Cloud?
Businesses have always functioned in a volatile environment; the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased their difficulties significantly and changed the dynamics of how they operate. Businesses irrespective of their size must reassess their assumptions and strengthen their ability to survive through emergencies.
As the world gradually comes out of the grip of the COVID-19 economic crisis there is a need for businesses to focus and re-engineer their core processes and implement newer strategies in critical business functions. Cloud ERP solutions here lend a helping hand by playing an active role in workforce management and crisis management.
SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is a robust and agile analytics platform that enables organizations to make improved decisions as and when needed. It can be used for gaining real-time insights so that enterprises can better manage and optimize their resources.
SAC is a leading SaaS solution. It is a HANA-based BI platform offering all necessary functions including planning, prediction, and business intelligence on a single UI (User Interface). It also provides analytics compatibility with data coming from a different database, CRM and ERP solutions, Microsoft SQL, ERP solutions, and Salesforce. Business users can compile data; perform data discovery, ad-hoc reporting, and analysis to support predictive planning. SAP Analytics tool converts the raw data from the transactional system into meaningful insights to facilitate better decision-making.
Implementing SAP Analytics Cloud
Modern businesses need to predict changes and trends in advance and make efforts to remain relevant and grow to be competitive. SAP Analytics Cloud can help companies survive adversity, helping minimize the impact of any crisis on business. As a global partner of SAP, Gemini Consulting & Services is well-placed to offer implementation support for SAC. SAP Analytics Cloud is highly recommended for enterprises that want to gain a competitive edge in a digitalized marketplace. Contact us to know how machine learning technology used by SAC helps to perform data cleaning, identify data errors, and suggest filtering options.
Benefits of SAC
- Single Comprehensive Solution: SAP Analytics Cloud encompasses all features right from planning to prediction, and business intelligence to augmented analytics in a simple user-friendly cloud-based environment.
- Accuracy: Whether it is operational planning or financial planning, accuracy, and ability to combine multiple teams and stakeholders while making policy-related decisions. SAP Analytics Cloud enables businesses to align their expenses and cost strategies across various teams like HR, Sales, IT, and marketing.
- Improved Forecasting and Planning: SAP Analytics Cloud combines ML (Machine Learning) and Predictive analytics-based features to help businesses build accurate plans related to expenses and costs quickly. Predictive features of SAC can automate the baseline expense planning by analyzing the previous data and making it easy to monitor plans in real-time.
- Actionable Insights: Augmented Analytics which is a part of SAC plays a vital role in exploring data, discovering production cycles and trends, and identifying all possible ways to implement cost plans effectively. Stakeholders can make actionable plans based on these insights and monitor the team’s performance in real-time.
- Real-Time Decision-Making: SAP Analytics Cloud enables businesses to convert these derived insights into action in no time. Since this cloud ERP solution is based on automated technology, it enables users to make decisions that are free from any basis. It has a natural language query feature that automatically generates visualizations to answer all the questions instantly. SAP Analytics Cloud can save thus the time and effort of businesses enabling them to focus on concentrate on high-value, core activities.
- Data Modeling: SAP Analytics Cloud also offers a data modeling feature, an end-to-end industry dashboard to obtain real-time reports and actionable insights.
