The increasingly confident business applications vendor has turned its attention to the expanding area of analytics. It is showing all the signs of embarking on the type of dogged, logical pursuit that characterized its CRM program which resulted in it gaining the number-two market position.
SAP’s objective is to make analytics available to the masses and offer something that falls between traditional static reporting and a specialist toolset. Context and the ability of users to act on analytic information are all-important in the SAP view of analytics and the role it can play in helping businesses perform. [SAP Analytics] allows business to create analytics to bridge the gap between transactional, business intelligence reporting and predictive analytics, said CEO Henning Kagermann.
He said businesses are unable to improve simply by adding products and services, so they need to look to their people and processes for competitive advantage. The quicker and more accurately a company can respond to its customers’ needs, the more of an edge it can gain. You have to have decision-making that is distributed and if it is distributed it is key that decisions are made on facts not opinions, said Kagermann. [I can see] in the future embedded analytics, collaborative tools, and real-time applications merged into transactional systems. The world will be managed by events and alerts.
By combining transactional data, BI, and predictive analytics, and embracing data from disparate enterprise systems, the aim is to deliver the insight needed to drive processes and determine next steps. Because they are enabled via NetWeaver, the SAP analytic applications should also be able to deliver data in the context of the specific process. Rather than just flagging up a blocked order, for example, the system should be able to identify who should know about it, and automatically route the issue through, provide specific information about the individual order, and enable actionable tasks to resolve the problem directly from the analytic application.
SAP said it has produced about 200 analytic dashboards for specific industries such as retail, manufacturing, and financial services, as well as more generic ones such as SAP Analytics for CRM, which provides visualization across marketing, lead-generation, pipeline visibility, sales effectiveness, and individual customer views. By unifying sales data with financial, fulfillment, and manufacturing inventory data, it can be used to provide a complete picture of customer buying patterns and profitability that can in turn be used to identify hidden business opportunities.
Each SAP analytic application is a composite application, created using NetWeaver technology components including Visual Composer, SAP’s model-based, code-free, composite application development tool.
SAP is working to improve Visual Composer and make it easier for customers to work with analytics via a partnership with Macromedia though which SAP is embedding the Macromedia Flex application framework to its NetWeaver integration platform. The next release of NetWeaver Visual Composer will include Macromedia’s Flex technology and be made available to existing NetWeaver customers. The addition of Flex means organizations will be able to generate dashboard-type interfaces for SAP applications, improving the way their users access relevant SAP data from the desktop and in theory increasing user productivity. The SAO Analytics user interface will also be able to use Flex technology so customers will be able to build and combine their own analytics applications and modify SAP’s dashboards.
