Planning For Everyone: SAP Analytics Cloud
Planning For Everyone: SAP Analytics Cloud
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Table of Contents
3 Quick Facts
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Quick Facts
Summary Solution
The SAP® Analytics Cloud solution allows plan- • One cloud-based solution for all types of
ners to make faster, more confident decisions by planners across the enterprise
unifying analytics and planning enterprise-wide. • Predictive planning to draw intelligence from
It consolidates data across applications and data and display results with interactive
builds better accountability with one extended dashboards
plan across the enterprise on which everyone has • Self-service scenario modeling and advanced
collaborated. Align strategic, financial, and analytical capabilities to increase planning
operational plans to uncover deep insights, accuracy and business agility
share predictive results, and resolve issues • Native processes to improve collaboration,
collaboratively – even from mobile devices. contextual planning, and decision-making
• Natural-language processing for ad hoc
Objectives queries to deepen insight on the fly
• Unify planning, business intelligence, and
predictive analytics in an intelligent enterprise Benefits
• Support extended planning and analysis • Advanced real-time analytics and scenario
(xP&A) by aligning strategic, operational, modeling without IT intervention
and financial plans • Shorter iteration cycles and greater productivity
• Predict future outcomes with machine for planners
learning–driven insights • Higher enterprise-wide accountability through
• Track discussion and issue-resolution process- collaboration capabilities and workflows
es across the enterprise • Better business outcomes through more-
• Boost collaboration and align stakeholder work accurate plans and smarter decisions
with corporate goals
Learn more
Find out more about SAP Analytics Cloud.
Sign up now for a free trial.
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Marketing, for example, can gain visibility into By enabling xP&A, SAP Analytics Cloud brings
sales plans when working toward campaigns. IT together a singular, real-time view of budgets and
planners can gain visibility into headcount plans plans (see Figure 1). With this approach, people
within HR to plan for assets. Finance can use the stop working in silos and collaborate across busi-
results of these plans to populate the income ness functions. People, plans, and decisions are
statements and balance sheets to create a better aligned so people can make better decisions and
budget and forecast. achieve better business outcomes.
IT
Marketing
Sales
Human resources
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Enterprise Business
planning intelligence
Insight
to action
Predictive
analytics
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The solution also includes features called “smart among KPIs, planners can use smart discovery to
discovery” and “smart insights,” both of which help answer the question “What if?” For example,
help planners understand business drivers and planners can list the marketing activities that
make better decisions more quickly. contribute to revenue and perform a simulation to
determine the effect that changing one of those
Smart discovery helps planners visualize contrib- activities could have on the other activities and
utors to key performance indicators (KPIs) and on revenue. The visualization in Figure 5 shows
identify outliers. As they examine trade-offs the use of smart discovery to analyze patterns
across the data.
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YOUR CHOICE OF INTERFACE FOR PLANNING existing data from SAP Analytics Cloud or input
Planners no longer need to choose between a new external data with the add-in – building custom
classic Microsoft Excel interface and a modern calculations, expanding hierarchies, generating
enterprise planning solution equipped with pow- ad hoc reports, and intuitively creating ratios and
erful analytics and xP&A. Now they can have the tracing data to the KPIs that matter most. They
best of both worlds by integrating SAP Analytics can make timely, data-driven decisions in a familiar
Cloud directly with Microsoft Excel using a simple Excel experience while incorporating powerful
add-in. analytics tools to plan, budget, forecast, and
simulate future outcomes on multiple versions.
With SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft
Office, planners can do their jobs either online
or at their desktop (see Figure 9). They can use
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Make Advanced Enterprise Planning Universal With visual formulas, planners can accelerate the
Not all planners are equipped with the technical enterprise planning process by building complex
skill set to create advanced planning formulas. calculations with a click of a mouse. Even planners
SAP Analytics Cloud makes collaborative enter- without any prior programming knowledge can
prise planning capabilities available to all users generate complex calculations and create scripts
through a feature called “visual formulas.” by simply dragging and dropping visual elements
and fine-tuning calculations with the visual editor
or script view (see Figure 10).
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Actuals analysis
Variance insights
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A prebuilt financial planning model ties SAP S/4HANA customers can expect integration
SAP Analytics Cloud to such business elements in of the core features of SAP Analytics Cloud and live
SAP S/4HANA as company code and functional connectivity to core data services queries. You can
area. The two solutions can share planning accel- import SAP S/4HANA data into SAP Analytics
erators such as templates for planning input, Cloud to help meet business-driven requirements
reports on actual values versus planned values, in which data agility is crucial. The powerful
best-practice allocations, and planning process calculation engine behind SAP HANA® extends
flow. A set of preconfigured dashboards lets users advanced analytics to a wide array of new use
share analytical accelerators, including trend cases. And you can apply smart discovery and
reports, year-over-year reports, and scenarios in smart insights to imported data, and SAP Analytics
SAP Digital Boardroom, the interactive dashboard Cloud data security concepts to authoring data in
for executives. Dashboards feature an option to SAP S/4HANA.
use both live data and KPIs.
INTEGRATING SUPPLY CHAIN, OPERATIONS,
Having transactions, analytics, and planning AND FINANCIAL PLANNING
functionality all in a single unified ERP and analytics With SAP Analytics Cloud, you can connect
backbone helps you close the gap between analysis advanced supply chain and operations planning
and action even more quickly than with cloud- with your financial planning and analysis processes
based analytics alone. Your IT group can become using the SAP Integrated Business Planning for
a better partner to the business by spending less Supply Chain solution (see Figure 13). Compare
time on formatting transactional details and more consensus demand plans with financial targets to
time delivering valuable insights. align demand and financial plans. Gain visibility
across the enterprise by displaying key figures
from your operations plan and financial KPIs in
SAP Analytics Cloud.
Figure 13: Integration with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain
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Features for live contextual discussions and data- With SAP Analytics Cloud, you can cleanse and
point commenting are built in, so stakeholders match data from disparate sources, spot outliers,
can discuss plans at all levels while accountability predict future directions based on trends, and
stays transparent. Interested parties can interact determine causality. And you can run robust,
on-screen from anywhere – in the office, on the iterative what-if analysis to zero in on key influ-
road, or at home – to keep the conversation going, encers involved in any business challenge, sharing
accelerating processes and boosting productivity and operationalizing data across the enterprise
across lines of business. Rich visualizations help and around the globe more efficiently and securely.
make complex information instantly comprehen-
sible, and dashboards automatically reformat to With SAP Analytics Cloud, your enterprise is
accommodate viewing on mobile device screens. smart – and gets smarter every day.
You can crowdsource plans and budgets to
maintain engagement and accuracy. And planners LEARN MORE
work on a platform that performs both transac- If you want to see how much your organization can
tional and analytical processing in-memory, so benefit from the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, try
they can act more quickly and iterate often without our free value calculator today.
missing deadlines.
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