SAP Lumira [EOL] Reviews

I use SAP for the procurement and planning department. However, my company has an SAP implementation in every department, whether its for production, reporting, finance, HR, etc.

SAP is the best system in the world, at least in my opinion. I like that it's a stable system and that many people in my company have development experience with SAP. The solution keeps on improving and has excellent support.

I think a lot of users aren't having fun using SAP because it requires putting in a lot of information by keyboard directly because it requires some coding, so this is one area for improvement.

From a user point of view, SAP is a complex system where you can learn and teach, so another area for improvement in the solution is that it needs to be more user-friendly.

In the next release of SAP, I want it to have a friendlier menu for its users.

I've been using SAP for three years.

SAP is a stable product.

SAP is a scalable product.

Support for SAP is good, so I rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

The management team decided to have one system, SAP, in every location. As it is an SAP product, my company uses it.

The difficulty level of setting up SAP is in the middle. It's more complex than IFS, but it becomes easy after a few months of experience. In the beginning, the team had some difficulties with the initial setup for SAP.

From start to finish, the deployment time for the solution takes about four to five months, so that's a little longer than IFS.

SAP is worth the money, which means you'll see an ROI from it if you use it.

In terms of cost, SAP is less affordable.

My advice to anyone looking into using SAP is that if there's a possibility to implement it, then please do because it'll give you several benefits. You'll have complete control of your company. Every ERP system is good for the company, but remember that SAP isn't cheap.

My rating for SAP is nine out of ten because it's a stable system and possibly the best in the world.

My company is an SAP customer.

We use SAP Lumira to build different dashboards for our tax purposes for companies. We had different KPIs for each company homepage, such as revenues, and operating income, in one dashboard. Additionally, we integrated a head count, which is an external source with dashboards coming from Workday.

The most valuable features of SAP Lumira are the dashboards, geographical elements, and graph filtering, and the usage is similar to a website which makes it easy to use.

SAP Lumira can improve if they game more capability to the end user to prepare dashboards because it's more of an IT task to create them. In Tableau, we can drag, drop, and create. However, in SAP Lumira, we need a designer and a separate KT to be able to do it well.

I have been using SAP Lumira for approximately one and a half years.

The stability of SAP Lumira depends on the servers that they are running on. We have our SAP Business Object servers running reports which might impact the performance of SAP Lumira. Everything is on one server.

SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard. The IT department has to come help with small changes to text or something minor, which is very straightforward on Tableau to do.

We have approximately 20 users using SAP Lumira. It is a tight-knit team.

The initial setup of SAP Lumira is complex.

We have a team that supports SAP Lumira. One from the backend team, one for managing, and one from the UI team.

SAP Lumira comes with SAP Business Object. I would advise others to make sure the use case for the use of SAP Lumera fits because there are other tools in the market which might be a better solution than SAP Lumera. Since we already had a SQL license and we had SAP Business Object, that's why we implemented SAP Lumira. There was no extra cost.

I rate SAP Lumira a six out of ten.

We use Lumira to develop dashboards and discovery needs and visualize data needs.

Managers need to have interactive dashboards, and SAP Lumira has allowed us to develop dashboards for their discovery needs. And after we deploy these dashboards into Launchpad BI, we can schedule their publication or execution and send it to the manager's email.

The best feature is the ease of developing dashboards.

Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow. Even with 128GB of RAM on our server, the execution time is still slow.

I've been using this solution for six years.

Lumira performs well.

Lumira is scalable - we can deploy a cluster with different nodes and deploy features on different nodes.

SAP's technical support do a good job and always respect the incidents.

The initial setup is easy, taking between two to four hours to deploy on the server side and then another hour on the client side.

I would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel. I'd give Lumira a score of nine out of ten.

Data visualization and data preparation are the primary uses. 

It is fairly easy and fast when it comes to using it.

An easier printing feature.

Stability is pretty decent (not bad).

It is highly scalable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

This solution is easy to use. It is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration. 

Geographic hierarchy and the ability to connect with SAP sources, such as CRM, ERP, and BW. Several data visualization tools do not support this. I am currently a student and what I like about it is the overall user-friendly experience. It is easy to manage and understand.

It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult. Once you know what is where, one can design the visualization. To know what is where using Lumira is difficult.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We have experienced no issues with performance.

It has been able to scale for our needs.

This is my first solution of this type. It was provided by the university for all students to help them with their studies.

It has a good interface. It is not so good for analysis.

The most value that Lumira provides is in its ability to consume the Business Objects universe.

In our experience, it hasn't improved our organization.

There are improvement that need to be made everywhere.

Lumira's capabilities feel like that of a store app with the intuitiveness of a desktop app, which is not a good combination. For SAP, Lumira may seem phenomenal, but when you take your SAP glasses off, it pales in comparison to other products in this space. 

I've been using it for one year.

The product crashed on several occasions, particularly when dealing with larger data sets.

I got an error when trying to load more than 10,000 rows, while I was able to load 200 million in PowerBI.

I started with Lumira first, but it’s like Chinese food - it's satisfying at first, but you quickly find yourself wanting more.

As SAP products go, the initial setup was easy, but, again, when compared to PowerBI, Lumira was more cumbersome.

PowerBI is way more capable at a much better price point: $10 per user without all the associated setup costs.

Don't waste your time. Lumira falls short of its competitors in this space both in capabilities and in ease of use. It has somewhat of a updated front end, but it suffers from its cobbling together of older technology components, i.e Webi menu hierarchy and a dialogue-box approach.

As a visualization tool, Xcelsius is superior to Lumira; as a data acquisition tool, Lumira is a vast improvement. In Xcelsius, it's difficult to get a finished product, but the finished product can be stunning. Although not as difficult, Lumira makes getting lack luster results harder than they should be. Lumira leaves you wondering whether the result you get is worth the effort you put in. 

If you put your SAP glasses on and make believe the rest of the world does not exist, Lumira can seem like a God-send. Short of that, I cannot in good conscience recommend rolling this out to end users. It feels very much like a concept-in-progress rather than a finished product. Unlike true technology companies (Google, Apple Microsoft) which invest billions a year in research projects -- research projects that may not have payoff in 10 years -- Lumira is the result of a quarter-to-quarter company mentality. What can I rehash to sell you now to meet my numbers? If SAP wants our money, they are going to have to meet us half-way and start investing some of theirs in products that we can use today and which put us in a position to take advantage of tomorrow, i.e. wider data integration with non-SAP data sources (the world doesn’t revolve around HANA), Cortana, conversation OS, SMS instead of screens, and the list goes on.

The challenge should’ve been simple: give me the same capabilities of Xcelsius with some updated features, and deliver it in a package that’s simple, intuitive and easier than before. Although clever, Lumira falls short on all these fronts.

Instead of improving or expanding the capabilities of Webi, SAP decided to create a new product. However, instead of the product being new, it seems to be a new face atop a set of glued components from their older products. From what I have gathered, there is nothing in Lumira that is not already available in an existing SAP product in some form or another. Lumira appears to be a watered-down version of these capabilities found across the SAP product line. I guess all this is to limit cannibalization. What this watering down leads to is an artificially-limited BI tool. This watering down is done while retaining the complexity inherited from the grafted pieces of its older technology. 

This is a reflection of how SAP views BI. Instead of BI being ubiquitous, SAP views BI as products they can sell. You have to go to a product to do a certain type of “BI”. Hence, SAP takes BI capabilities and provides them across twelve products (four in the future, which is still too many). Conversely, the Microsoft philosophy is to provide BI capabilities within and across all its tools, with PowerBI being a standalone culmination. Microsoft accomplishes all this elegantly in a well thought out product without adding complexity. Lumira is to PowerBI what Blackberry is to the iPhone. 

I get it, SAP must sell "new" products. With the saturation of the traditional ERP market, SAP must introduce new products to grow revenue. They have to do so without cannibalizing the products they have in other markets. This drives how SAP approaches the market. This reality appears to limit Lumira’s capabilities and feature set as it must always be careful not to cross over into capabilities found in sister products BO or Data services, Explorer etc. This is not the case with PowerBI, hence PowerBI has a broader feature set that, ironicall, is easier for SAP to use.  As a result, PowerBI is a superior product which widens the gap with every month’s release. 

Making the comparison is almost unfair. Even though they are both cars, it’s like asking to compare an upgraded Yugo to a new Ferrari. And in this case, the Ferrari costs less. So why would anyone in their right mind choose the Yugo? Someone who is used to using horses, of course, and no one is better at selling used cars than SAP.

The good news is that SAP can change this. But it’s going to cost them to convert from a technology company with products from a product company that has acquired some technology. One has immediate payback while the other may take years to see a profit.

• Beautiful visualizations
• Data cleansing
• Slice and dice reports

This is a tool that gives more power to the user. Now we don't have to wait on our IT teams to create or change reports. Once IT gives us a static list of ingredients (fields), we can create our own recipes (charts and tables) without further IT dependence.

It would be great to have more ETL capabilities so that the user can do more cleansing/mining on his/her side.

I've used it for two years.

There was an issue with non-dynamic charts a while ago when we started, but it’s all good now.

There was an issue with non-dynamic charts a while ago when we started, but it’s all good now.

There was an issue with non-dynamic charts a while ago when we started, but it’s all good now.

The level of customer service is good, but the speed and quality of their responses vary each time.

The initial setup was straightforward since Lumira provides direct connectors to SAP HANA. It was really easy to connect and consume live data. s

We had an in-house team and we recommend a migration of the database to SAP HANA to maximize the performance.

Lumira is a really good data exploration tool. Download the desktop tool and give it a try.

Ability to quickly and easily create visualizations with large datasets.

We’ve created several dashboards that display large sets of data in an insightful and easily digestible way.

Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents.

It also needs more functionality when creating visualizations (basic functionality exists; would like ability to do more complex functions).

It additional could use greater ability to manipulate data in the Prepare tab.

I've used it for one year.

There have been no deployment issues.

At times, Lumira will crash and/or the save function doesn’t work. These seem to happen when the program has been open for a long period of time (several hours).

Lumira doesn’t handle large datasets well. I needed to bring in multiple years’ worth of data recently, but was unable to due to the size of the dataset.

Technical support is good. I contacted SAP about an issue on a Friday afternoon and was able to speak with an SAP rep on Monday morning. The matter was not resolved, but SAP was very responsive over a period of several days.

We had no previous solution was in place.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I wasn’t involved in the decision. A key decision maker in my organization uses Tableau and raves about it. I believe we went with Lumira since it was part of the SAP product stack and thus complemented our existing SAP tools.

Choose a few people to become super users with Lumira (one business user and one technical user), and allow them to champion the product and teach others what they’ve learned. Watch YouTube videos!

I like the integration, so it's easy to integrate different data sources. Then you can play with the data in the first screen that basically turns it into a table. I like that, that I can integrate multiple sources of data.

To be honest, the way I function, I'm not sure it has improved the organization. I work for an SAP third-party vendor, so I got my Lumira license through my company. Basically, we use it because it's an SAP product and we have a certain amount of licenses for our company. I use it as a tool to visualize some data about SAP, so actually, I typically only use it for presentations. To some extent, it has improved them.

An area of improvement, for sure, is the flexibility of the visualization. Often, my clients want us to see the data in a very specific way, maybe with their color palettes or whatever they want to see. Lumira is not very flexible when it comes to the color palette, or even being able to sort of like change the axes so that I want to see data in a different order. I want to see the bars in a different order, things like that. It's harder to manipulate than if I were to use Excel, where it's very simple to manipulate that kind of thing.

Lumira is a little bit more what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but if you need to change it substantially, I still go back to Excel.

The first time I used it was about a year and a half ago. I use it pretty infrequently. I don't use it every day, but yeah, I've been using it for about a year and a half.

It's a bit slow. It seems to be a bit of a hog on resources, but overall, I've never had it crash. I have heard that it has crashed when you pull in big data sets, but typically, I don't pull in very big data sets. Maybe I only have a thousand records. I've never experimented with a million records or two million records, or other loads that might be a better test of its stability.

I haven't had any scalability issues because I've never really really leveraged the tool for very, very large data. I've only ever used the tool for its visualizations with small data sets, a thousand records or less.

I've never reached out to Lumira customer service. Overall, I'm happy with their releases. Their releases seem to be come out fairly frequently. New releases always seem to improve it, but I've never spoken to the customer service directly.

The setup was very straightforward. I installed it, I registered the license, and then I was up and running within a few minutes. It really wasn't very hard to set up.

I've used Tableau before. I like Tableau. The company I work for now doesn't have a license for Tableau, and they have a license for Lumira. I wanted to leverage Lumira for the same functions as Tableau. I would say that, to be honest, it's not quite the same level.

My rating is because I see the potential that it has for the business user. I don't think it's quite at the point where it's flexible enough to be a stand-alone data visualization tool, the only one you use, because, as I've mentioned, I still use Excel. I use Excel more than I use Lumira for some specific reports and similar tasks, but I often find myself using Lumira for some of the fancier reports. For example, the geographical and other reports that Excel doesn't do quite as well. I see that it has a lot of really great tools, but it's not flexible enough for to use day-to-day.

It's very easy to import data and also to create formulas and so on. In that sense, it's really easy and friendly. Also, it made creating charts, and especially, for example, the bubble charts, really easy and very powerful.

I've been creating metrics that show variances, for example, in surgery times and supplies used in surgeries, and also in expenses, analyses of expenses. That has helped me a lot. What I presented was really, really impressive for the rest of the team.

It would be valuable if I could more easily share what I do. Right now, where I work, we have SAP BusinessObjects, but there's no way to easily store on a server and share. If we could store models I create in a folder that I could share. Sharing is something that I think should be improved.

Also, because Lumira saves directly to your My Documents folder, it stays in your C: drive. That means I cannot simply share it with the team in my department. They have to make it easier for you to store in any folder, not just My Documents, because My Documents is on my C: drive, and that makes no sense. I thought, "Why did they do that?"

Another thing that should be improved is the connection, the ability to use different sources in the same model. I think Lumira can do it, but it's not easy. We don't have HANA, so I cannot easily access any of the queries I have in BusinessObjects. I have to go to BusinessObjects, export to Excel, and then input the Excel file into Lumira.

Not being able to use data that is updated continuously is something that really bothers me, because I have to keep remembering, "I have to update this, I have to update this." I know that the refresh works, it refreshes and it's really really good.

Also, sometimes it doesn't input data, which is really important. For example, if there is an Excel file that is really big, like 1GB, it was just unable to input it. I just couldn't work with it. The file I was using was perfect. The file didn't have any blocks or something like that. I don't know why it didn't input that one.

Also, if you have one visualization, and you want to show several areas or windows that you can resize and so on. With Lumira, it's very difficult to resize it because the areas are square. It's not like what I had before.

I would like to see them improve the format of the text that you use, so you can play more with fonts, and put more information on one screen.

I had been using the solution for maybe a year and a half.

I did not encounter any stability issues. It's a stable product. Once you import the data and you start working with it, it's very stable.

I don't use it for high volumes right now, because when I started to input big files, it was not possible to work with it. It took too long or it didn't input at all. I found that limit. I don't want to have issue because we use very big files. Sometimes we want to analyze three or four years of data, and those are big files. Lumira is not good at that at this moment.

I haven't really had to use support. I didn't ask for support because the tool is easy to use. I don't know if support is good or not, because I haven't used it.

I didn't have to call them, because the training videos that they have are really good. They are very clear and very easy to follow. They cover a lot of areas, so that's maybe why I didn't ask for any support. Every time we needed something, I went to the videos and I learned how to do it.

I used SAP Dashboard Designer, and switched because SAP Dashboard Designer is too much work. Every time, if, for example, you have the data through May, and then the June data arrives, you want to update it. Your source file updates perfectly, but the chart doesn't update. It doesn't create that additional column. You have to go into the setting and change it. It's a lot of work. I was working with that, maybe, for two to three years. I created like 200 visualizations of different areas, but then I said, "No".

With Lumira, if the data updates, it updates my model, but in SAP Dashboard Designer it doesn't do that.

Initial setup was basically straightforward. It was easy, really easy. There was no problem with that. I already had a Lumira personal edition that I bought for me. I have it on my personal computer at home. I started it with no issues. The one we have in the hospital, the guys in IT, they installed it very easy, so that's not an issue.

Lumira was very useful for me, but now I have more needs, and I have to move faster because I am responsible for a lot of data, and a lot of information that I have to provide to the directors and VPs. I need a tool that works really fast and that allows me to build like a master.

Power BI is the tool I was looking for, so I stopped using Lumira completely, because the software from Microsoft is exactly what I wanted. The connections and the way I save and everything is something that I was looking for. With Lumira, it's a lot of work and everything has to be in Excel most of the time anyway. I need to connect directly between my databases. That's my experience. For now, Lumira works fine, but I couldn't do what I do now, combining different files and things like that easily. That's my experience.

When I compare Lumira with the other software that I'm using now, Power BI, I see that Power BI does it in such a friendly way and it covers every need. For someone like me who is in business analysis, Power BI gives me exactly what I need.

It's really user-friendly.