SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

I like the connectivity the solution provides with other products. One can see different data sources, such as SAP ERP and the in-house hub which they provide. It allows one to create a business warehouse and then get the data import from there as well. So too, the solution is multi-dimensional, meaning the person can use a flat file and collect data from different sources. 

When importing data from a different source, the solution should also act as an ETL tool to allow for the task permissions with the live data. 

The solution could be more stable. I rate its stability as a seven out of ten. 

I rate the scalability as a seven out of ten, as the solution occasionally falls to pieces and requires us to tweak our scripting. Scalability definitely needs to be improved. 

The solution should include other scripting languages as well, such as Python. Also, I am curious to see if they will include AI and ML capabilities going forward. 

I have much experience working with SAP Analytics Cloud, as I have been doing so for two-and-a-half years. 

The solution could be more stable. I rate its stability as a seven out of ten. 

I rate the scalability as a seven out of ten, as the solution occasionally falls to pieces and requires us to tweak our scripting. Scalability definitely needs to be improved.

The initial setup is straightforward. We are talking about a complete package which is supplied by SAP itself. So, once the person has the package online, he can simply use it on the spot. There is no setup required. 

If someone is using an SAP environment in their businesses, it's good to adapt SAP Analytical Cloud. But, if the person is using another ERP software, say, QuickBooks, there are other market options to opt for. The solution works well if one is using the SAP package. 

I rate SAP Analytics Cloud as an eight out of ten. 

I primarily use the solution for reporting. We talk to people in all different roles and in all different types of companies and organizations. It's just to get a more well-rounded scope.

We use it to build a human capital dashboard and I use it to report on workforce data, hires and exits, movements, and items of that nature.

I like the forecasting capabilities. 

There is a really nice insight feature that I enjoy using. It automatically adds input, which is quite helpful. 

The initial setup was super simple. 

The customizations need to be better. In order to do some basic functions, in order to create certain basic functions in input control, you need to know a couple of basic programming languages. It would be better if these input controls were easier to create or to get working. For example, in Tableau, it's so easy. You just add these controls. However, in this product, for certain basic functions like dropdown boxes, it's more difficult for the basic business user. If you're not in IT, it's not as easy as Tableau.

The product needs to offer more options for navigation. There need to be dropdown filtering op boxes. Right now, when you filter, what you have filtered is not presented - the selection isn't on the screen. If you're looking at it, you don't know if you've got the right number unless you hover over it.

Some of the functionalities that do not use any IT or business language, such as BIAL, which is a subset of JavaScript, and something called CSS, need to be incorporated.

The analytics app is designed for programmers. You need to know programming languages in order to use the solution effectively, and some users aren't programmers. Unfortunately, if you want something that should be simple to do, that's not available as you need to have that programming language.

I'm a new-ish user; I just started this year. I would say I've used it for less than a year.

The product seems very secure. It seems very stable. I've had no issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze.

The scalability is very good. I am not using it to its current potential, however, this is one of the benefits of the program, as is it can be scaled out for the whole organization, due to the ability for it to connect directly to the cloud data and right to the SAP.

Different business units are using the solution, including HR, long-term care, and transportation. I'm not sure how many users are leveraging it, however. We are a city-wide organization and different government areas use it.

It is not widely used right now, as we are still in the demo stage. That said, I can say that the organization is planning on committing to it.

I've never had to use technical support except to go to my own IT staff for help, and therefore I can't comment very well on SAP's level of assistance.

I'm also familiar with Tableau.

We were using Excel and Tableau, and we stopped using Excel due to the fact that there's no scalability there. It's just very slow and cumbersome. That was Microsoft, actually. With Tableau, we are also using it for other things. Due to the nature of this software, it's good for some projects, and Tableau is better for others. This one's more suited towards data that is coming directly from a live system. Tableau works really well with flat files.

For me, the implementation was very simple.

Our IT department provided me with the access rights and provided me with the appropriate links, as well as all of the training materials that SAP has on their website.

My deployment was small and quick. For the whole organization, it takes much longer. I am using it with a flat-file, inserting data into the cloud to connect with it, and therefore, my scope is very small compared to the whole organization. It did not take me long at all.

I handle the maintenance myself. It doesn't require much maintenance. I do work with IT when I need to.

I used our IT staff, however, they have been working with representatives from the company in order to deploy the product organization-wide.

I can't speak to the licensing or costs. I'm not involved in that aspect just yet.

There seem to be three different levels of licenses, including one for a viewer, and one for a designer and one is for analytics.

This is currently the solution we are evaluating.

My advice would be to all-out purchase the analytics application, as some of the features are in just the designer mode, and they are not going to be sufficient. You're going to need some of the features that are contained in the third option, the analytics application.

Users need to be very familiar with what they have called the data modeler and should spend some time modeling and rendering data in their data modeler or just importing data into something called the dataset. With the dataset, users have more flexibility, however, the data modeling, that's something I didn't know starting out. Had I done it differently, I might have used the data modeler.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

My VP asked me to work with my plan number to figure out how to increase and support our sales region. On the planning admin, I created a model and then imported actual and forecasted data. From that, I was able to determine the variance. We managed to plan this with small amounts of data. 

We created a planning model and enabled it to make a planning checkmark that works with the time category in the tab dimension, in order to bring it down to the lowest granularity, by month, start date, and end date. 

We created an organization dimension. A responsible person to monitor each region is required. Then you can drag and drop the region hierarchy from the parent.

Then, we worked on the calculated numbers, for example, the gross margin, which was the total revenue minus COGS. We then divided that number by total revenue times one hundred. From there, we could pull the data from the file and select source actuality to validate it. 

We performed all of this using SAP Analytics Cloud.

In the most recent release, the schedule publication was officially updated and it's been added on MS Office 365. I like how we had an EPM for B to C perspective; it's a great enhancement. Also, I believe the B to B connectivity has been improved. Android support for mobile is really good also. Power BI has always had android support in place, so manual support for SAP Analytics Cloud is also a very good feature.

Smart Insights have also been enhanced, especially in regards to the Stories.

Apart from that, I would like to see more data-handling enhancement. Smart planning can give us immediate results.  When we come to analytics, If we could get more enhancement, we could probably completely skip the data warehousing concepts. This would be a big improvement.

With all of the new updates, now we can combine different types of data together and give our customers a full picture. 

I am happy with the new release that is coming out. It's comparatively a little slower than the version we had from 2019-2020; however, the enhancements they have added are much better than previous versions.

The most valuable feature is that we can allocate, spread, and distribute the actual figures.

The cost is an area that could be improved. I also think that Ofice 365 should be incorporated. People would find it to be more user-friendly with Office 365 integrated. Flat file integration can be a distinguishing factor.

Custom visuals is another area of improvement. There are also some mobile features that are missing. There are features that aren't available on the mobile. 

There should also be better connectivity tools for HANA and Success Factors. They have minimal visualization relations and they have the third-party add-ins.

I have been using this solution for the past six months.

We have 300-plus Stories that we already had in the system, that we had to do performance tuning. I brought it down to 267, to be exact. We had over 302 dashboards and then we brought it down to 111 stories on 267 visualizations. When we have too many pages, the performance gets impacted a little on the initialization part. When we open the story, it takes a little bit of time because it's not on-premise. Because our clients are based in the Netherlands and we are based in Bangalore, we had to manage the different time zones, and the business hours are different. We had to find out during the peak business hour how the SSE behaves.

We found that in the peak business hours it does slow down a little bit, considering the internet speed and everything. We did take everything into account. Then we checked the performance and the data also. In order to be competitive with the other software in the market, a little enhancement in this part also would give the upper hand compared to other BI tools.

We used to go in a cognitive window wherein we don't have any caches in place, so that we could get an accurate picture of the performance. But we also want to reduce the number of filters, and then we want to do more slicing and dicing across the data and try to see how it improves. In the near future, we would try to test the data more.

It performs quite well. Custom visuals would definitely help us to improve a little more. 

There are more viewer licenses. We have got close to 130 users for Analytics Cloud. And for developer access, for read and write, at our location we have around six plus two for planning, altogether 11 to 12 licenses. 

We have BW HANA. So we have only four developers as of now. We used it more extensively before the pandemic but not as much now. We do have plans to increase usage in the near future. 

The technical support is quite good. Any time there is a new release and we have any issues, we connect with the technical support team and then go ahead and write about it in a blog so that the other users can also get help for similar issues. 

We previously used Cognos Analytics and Tableau. I've done a couple of POCs on Tableau and worked on micro-strategy. We switched to SAP Analytics Cloud primarily for the planning, development, and the user-friendliness. When SAP comes up with a solution, they definitely try to be up to market. The features were not in a premature stage. We had faith that SAP had enhanced features compared to other BI tools.

The initial setup was pretty easy. It was also easy for my team. They thought it was easy to install. There's no download, there was no complexity.

We do the maintenance for it because we know the ins and outs of the development. We also do the admin.

If you are new to SSE and are trying to implement SSE in your project, don't think that SSE is an SAP product. Look into the features because I am sure you'll be satisfied with the features. They come out with the releases. I go into the release notes to understand what are the enhancements are. This will make it easier to understand. 

If you have somebody who isn't as experienced with BI, even that person can still learn SSE and can cope up with the BI requirements. In India, if you want to be a BI compatible, you have to have at least three years' experience so that you can understand all of the data warehousing concepts, and EDL. With SSE, learning is very smooth and easy.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

The missing point would be because of the performance. 

We use SAP Analytics Cloud mainly to get insights into the customer data, such as what type of orders, the type of customers, and correlations among the orders. For example, we also get insights on cash flow, the frequency of orders, and causes for unfulfilled orders.

The data we get from SAP Analytics Cloud is more analytical, where we try to analyze what happened. Based on our analysis, our customers can explain the pitfalls in their current systems.

What my customers like best about SAP Analytics Cloud is the dashboard because it's pretty good.

I also find the data extraction feature, where you extract data to an Excel sheet, useful.

One area for improvement in SAP Analytics Cloud is incorporating Python into the coding. That functionality is available, but it's not as efficient, and it's a bit difficult sometimes to do it, so that could be improved.

Compared to the IBM solution, per many of my customers, SAP Analytics Cloud is less user-friendly than IBM, so this is another area for improvement.

I've worked with SAP Analytics Cloud for more than a year and still use it, though it's not every day that I use it. My usage of SAP Analytics Cloud is on and off based on the client's requirements. My company is an SAP solutions provider, but it doesn't often get requests for SAP Analytics Cloud here in India.

Looking at my period of usage for SAP Analytics Cloud, it seems long, but the actual work is not so much. Sometimes, there's none. The last time I worked with the solution was one month ago.

SAP Analytics Cloud is stable, so my company hasn't received many complaints from a stability point of view.

The scalability of SAP Analytics Cloud is eight out of ten.

My company hasn't had the opportunity to work with enormous data because clients only had a few hundred GBs of data, so not a very big database to work with, but then, with SAP HANA coming in, it's becoming easier to deal with the data. It's much more efficient to handle larger data sets versus connecting with SAP ECC. Connecting to SAP HANA makes the process more efficient and the data transfer much more effortless.

The support for SAP Analytics Cloud could use some improvement because if the client is pretty important, my company receives faster replies from the support team. However, it takes longer for technical support to reply and resolve the issues if the client isn't that big.

I'd rate SAP technical support as six on a scale of one to ten.

Neutral

I was also involved in one or two projects trying to connect SAP Analytics Cloud with IBM Analytics, and it was a good experience, but I haven't worked with an IBM solution. Still, I feel IBM is more flexible because it uses different languages versus SAP Analytics Cloud, where you have to use SAP proprietary language by default. You can use other languages, but you need to do some configurations first, while IBM, out of the box, supports multiple languages, so that's the big difference between SAP Analytics Cloud and IBM Analytics.

The initial setup for SAP Analytics Cloud was pretty easy, primarily because my company only works with SAP solutions, so connecting SAP Analytics Cloud to an SAP environment was easy, with not much hassle.

My company works with multiple solutions, including SAP Analytics Cloud and traditional BI tools.

Because of the SAP partnership, my company doesn't get data from other systems; instead, it only uses data from SAP to create all data services.

Overall, SAP Analytics Cloud is a good solution, and if you're dealing exclusively with SAP products, then it's a good marriage. It's a seven on a scale of one to ten.

I recommend the solution to others because it's excellent. It's a good fit in the overall landscape of SAP.

My company is an SAP partner.

I work on the planning and price planning and I create dashboards.

It is user-friendly. 

It's easy to set up.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is helpful.

It's scalable. 

We have not found any shortcomings. It does what we need it to do. However, while most of the things have been incorporated, doing data action optimization wasn't something that we could have done. We needed data action capabilities. 

The scope is limited to a few accounts. We need to limit that data in order to get enhancement in terms of performance. There are a few little challenges there. This needs to be considered in the planning stages. For example, how to enhance or limit data and look up or delete statements. You need to consider data locking and access control.

I've been working with the solution for four or five months now. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We have 15 to 16 people using the solution in our company currently. 

The solution is easily scalable. however, that does mean it will get more expensive. 

There are dimension restrictions. The scope is limited to only five to six accounts. That is one challenge. So we cannot have more scopes.

Technical support has been good. They are helpful and responsive. we're satisfied with the level of support on offer. 

Positive

The initial implementation is very straightforward and simple. it's not complex. 

I don't have the exact details of the pricing. It's my understanding that as you scale, the price will rise. 

We did look into other planning solutions. 

We are using the corporate edition. I'm a user and consultant. 

I'd advise new users to use it as much as possible. It helps make it more stable and scalable. It's very user-friendly and intuitive for both the management and technical team - no matter who uses it, it's not too hard to deal with.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. There's still from for improvement, however, I am largely happy with the product. 

We use this solution for data visualizations.

The general management of this solution could be improved. The graphics or icons could also be improved to allow them to integrate with other environments on the web.

In a future release, it would be great to have improved connectivity to make it easier to read other kinds of metadata from other data sources.

I have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution, however, scalability is a matter of cost. 

The technical support for this solution is okay. Support tickets are responded to based on priority. 

Neutral

This solution is pricey.

I would recommend this solution for companies that are SAP dependent with users working in this environment. If company's core applications are not SAP based, I wouldn't advise using this solution, because it's pricey. It is possible to get comparable usability with other tools that are much cheaper in the market.

I would recommend this solution for large enterprises. For small enterprises, I would rather recommend solutions such as Tableau or Power BI.  

SAP Analytics Cloud is comparatively the same as other BI tools, such as Power BI or Tableau. However, this solution has more programmability and allows you to do more application development. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We are using SAP Analytics for complete enterprise. We are customers and I am a business analytics manager. 

The product has helped us to unify reporting between all departments and throughout the entire company; it has improved our organization by streamlining operations. 

Data integration is very good. It's a very good product and cost-effective.

I would like to have more tabular reporting capabilities, like page reports. 

I've been using this solution for more than two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

We've had a good experience with customer support. They're active and we have an exclusive relationship manager to move us forward with the product. It provides us with extra care.

Positive

The previous solution we used was not addressing our enterprise needs. 

The initial implementation took a week and then we gradually adopted it throughout the company. Deployment was carried out in-house and we currently have 200 users who range from C-level to end users. We have three people who help out with maintenance and they have backgrounds in engineering or architecture. 

Analytics has improved our bottom line by improving processes. 

We get competitive rates for our licensing so I'm not complaining. 

We evaluated Tableau and Power BI before choosing SAP. The decision to go with SAP was connected to our underlying data. If your data is on SAP and your data warehouse is SAP Business Warehouse, as in our case, it made sense to go with SAP Analytics. 

I think it's important to be strategy-driven based on your underlying data. If you are an SAP-based organization, this is a good solution. If you are non-SAP, then you might be better off looking at an alternative solution. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We mainly use Analytics Cloud because it integrates with other SAP solutions. Our ERP is an SAP product, and our back-end is SAP Business Warehouse, so integration is an essential factor.

SAP could add some more visualization features to Analytics Cloud, like charts and analytics. I would also like to see some more data cleaning and ad hoc functions added to this solution.

I've been using SAP Analytics Cloud for almost three years now.

We have around 1,500 people using Analytics Cloud. Everyone from the lowest interns to the C-level suite uses it. 

I rate SAP support seven out of 10. It's good but not at the expected level.

Setting up Analytics Cloud is straightforward because it's a cloud service provided by SAP. Once you sign the contract, they give you the URL, and you can use the product. Everything is out of the box.

We considered Microsoft BI, but it didn't have the same seamless integration with SAP.

I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud seven out of 10 because the product needs to mature a lot. SAP still needs to add several features to make it a robust BI solution. For example, they should improve the charts and table components.