SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

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. 

The product's native integration with SAP ERP systems is particularly valuable.

The product could improve by enhancing connectivity issues and speeding up response times for support queries.

I have been working with SAP for more than 15 to 20 years.

The product is stable. 

We have contacted SAP support primarily for connectivity issues. While the support team was helpful, reaching the right executive took about a week, which could be improved.

Neutral

The initial setup took approximately three months, involving thorough integration with our SAP ERP systems.

The platform is about 50% more expensive than Power BI.

If the customer uses SAP ERP, I would recommend SAP Analytics Cloud. Otherwise, they should investigate other tools.

I rate it an eight. 

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.

We are in the experimental stage. We are still using other business intelligence tools. However, we are experimenting with the SAP Analytics Cloud as a possible replacement or alternative.

The storytelling is great.

It is scalable.

The solution is reliable and stable.

Before the implementation, I read a lot about SAP Analytics Cloud. However, I am sad to say other functions or functionalities were not included in our version right now.

We are not using it regularly yet. Maybe more testing on our part is needed before talking about a lack of features.

As I use the SAP Analytics Cloud, I'm using only data, so I am grabbing data and putting it onto the SAP Analytics Cloud. Our boss wants to connect the data directly to the SAP database. That is one of the things they would like to do before we totally use it as our business intelligence solution.

The budget management could be better. I forget the exact term. However, the finance department will use the functionality for budget management across all the departments within the company.

There is a feature where all reports will be centralized in one, and it will be shown on one big monitor. If you put it on a monitor with touch capability, it would be perfect. It would really look good for reporting.

The predictive analysis should be stronger.

I started using the solution in 2020. However, I am not using it yet on a regular basis. 

I tried it before implementation and based on my experience, that's why our company got licensed for the SAP Analytics Cloud.

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn’t crash or freeze.

The product is scalable. So far, we’ve been happy with it. That said, said, we are in the stage of testing it right now. We are not yet entirely using it as our main DA.

I have not yet experienced technical support.

I’m not the one implementing it right now. Maybe our SAP basis team would have a better account of how the implementation went. I was more on the functional side. The technicality of setting it up is outside of my capabilities right now.

You only need a small team for deployment and maintenance.

We have consultants assisting us with the implementation.

The costs and licensing are outside my level of knowledge. I don’t deal with it directly.

That said, there may be additional costs involved. Some functionalities of the SAP Analytics Cloud are not yet included in our version.

We are end-users.

We are not using it in the cloud. We are in the on-premise platform at this moment. It’s a hybrid, currently.

I’m not sure which version of the solution we’re using.

My current job is in SAP production support, so I am the one handling incident reports or incident tickets and problem management for all the SAP-related tickets. I’m somewhere between a user and a consultant. I’m not a reseller.

I’d advise potential users that it's better to connect it directly to the database so that it will have data harmony from your ERP if you are using SAP as well as this SAP Analytics Cloud. That way, you can create reports and extract data anytime you like. Right now, we are just pulling data in SAP and then into the SAP database and putting it on SAP Analytics Cloud to create a story or a report itself.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten. This is mostly due to the business intelligence functionality only, as I have not yet really tried out the other functions.

I used SAP Analytics Cloud to create a functionality called Digital Boardroom, which is mainly an executive KPI form of presentation for board meetings. In Columbia in 2019, there weren't more than five implementations of this solution. All of them were made by SAP directly. 

The key solution is the implementation I made for a company with over 16,000 employees and about ten lines of business. We consolidated all the information for ten lines of businesses in the SAP Digital Boardroom.

I like the product's capabilities. The clarity and scenarios are the main features that allow us to forecast using machine learning algorithms and make decisions.

The price, integration, and modeling capabilities could be better. I have to use an integration engine to integrate our products and databases. SAP Analytics Cloud is made specifically for KPIs and business intelligence. The modeling capabilities are kind of poor. You always have to model the data and then present it visually in SAP Analytics Cloud.

In the next release, I would like to have a lite version for planning to create scenarios quickly. For me personally, planning is the most complicated feature of SAP Analytics Cloud.

I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for about six years. 

SAP Analytics Cloud is very stable. For all these years, I didn't have any issues.

SAP Analytics Cloud is scalable. If you can collect data from third-party devices, then you can model the data, and it's fully scalable.

Technical support is good.

On a scale from one to five, I would give technical support a four.

Positive

The initial setup isn't too difficult, but it requires specific knowledge. You need at least three people to set up and maintain this solution for medium-sized projects. You need two people for data construction and one person for data management and integration.

On a scale from one to five, I would give the initial setup a four.

SAP Analytics Cloud is expensive. The price is a big issue if you compare it with other solutions from different vendors.

I would tell potential users to focus on the data, the source of the data, and the modeling capabilities. If you model well, you can present anything you want.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SAP Analytics Cloud an eight.

I won't give it a ten just because of the solution's modeling capabilities and the price compared to other solutions in the market.

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 it for enterprise-wide analytics. We have on-prem as well as cloud deployments.

Planning and integration are the most valuable features. It is useful for planning, and it is useful for integrating with on-prem or cloud SAP solutions. 

Its integration or connectivity with non-SAP systems, big data, and social media, such as YouTube, LinkedIn, et cetera, can be improved. This is where SAP has limited features as compared to other solutions.

There is very little documentation. They could provide additional training and resources.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for the last two years, but overall, I have been using analytics for the last 15 years.

We found it to be pretty stable over the last two years.

We hope so. We have not reached a level to be able to say how good it is and how quickly scalable it is, but we believe that it would be scalable. I do not have a proof point to say that it is 100% scalable.

So far, we've been able to resolve most of the issues on our own. Their support is average. It is not great, but it is also not bad.

Its setup is easy.

Its price is slightly on the higher side.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.