SAP Analytics Cloud Reviews

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.

We have our data stored in SAP BW. SAP Analytics Cloud is now the main Reporting Tool from SAP. We are gradually shifting the reporting from BO Webi / BO Lumira / BEx Wad to SAC.

It improves the buy-in from business for SAP technology.

Its user-friendliness is very valuable for end-users. It allows them to create dashboards without very experienced IT knowledge (compared to BO Lumira).

Though it's the best placed product when working with an SAP BW backend, it still lacks a lot of functionalities when compared to other tools such as Power BI or Tableau. 

The technical support of SAP is not perfect and could be much better. 

It takes a lot of time to have lacking functionalities implemented.

The integration with the BW backend can still be improved. Though both solutions are from the same vendor and the tool is positioned as "the" reporting tool on top of a BW environment, the integration between both still lacks a smooth integration. For example, authorization management is still not synchronized out of the box.

We were amidst the first adaptors of SAC and have seen it growing to a more mature level.

It is quite stable. We had very limited downtime in the past years. The continuous upgrades (cloud) can deliver sometimes moments of surprise, certainly when the layout is impacted.

It is very scalable.

Their technical support is not perfect and could be better. SAP Analytics Cloud is still lacking a lot of functionalities as compared to its competitors, and when we address these questions to SAP, it takes a lot of time to have these functionalities implemented.

Yes, multiple tools: WAD, BO xCelcius, Lumira. 

It is the future vision of SAP (for now).

The initial setup of SAP Analytics Cloud is easy because it is a cloud product. You can start using the environment very soon after the decision to do so is taken.

In house with a little help during startup from SAP.

Its pricing is fair when compared to its competitors.

Tableau, Power BI. From a user perspective, much more flexible and functional, but lacking the proper integration with SAP BW.

If your data is stored in the SAP environment, it is still the best tool in the market. Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are very nice in functionality and layout, but they lack functionality when you link them to an SAP database.

My suggestion would be to use the tools from the same vendor. The reporting tool should be from the same vendor whose backend system you are using. I advised the same in our company because we have a lot of tools. If you have an SAP data warehouse, then use tools from SAP on top of this data warehouse. If you have SQL Database, then Microsoft Power BI is more suitable.

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

We use this solution for financial planning and analysis. We definitely plan to expand our usage of this solution. 

This solution brings our team together easily through its collaboration abilities. 

The ability to collaborate and plan together is great. In fact, the collaboration capabilities across the board are very good. Also, integration-wise, it's very good. 

I would like to know how Analytics Cloud plays with other products like SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud. SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is now integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud, but I would like to know how they strategically work together; what is the strategy? How do they work together and how is SAP planning to implement self-service? Currently, it's not very clear — particularly regarding Data Warehouse Cloud which is now part of SAP Analytics Cloud. It's quite difficult to navigate because SAP has many products.

Figuring out how to navigate all of the products around Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud and BW for HANA is quite difficult. The strategy of all the individual products and the roadmap itself, if you take it separately, it all looks good. There is a transformation navigator, but I don't think it's useful. It's not very easy to use; it's more technical than it is on the business side. In short, the roadmap and integration with other SAP Analytics products like Data Warehouse Cloud need to be improved. It's not clear and I can't find any information from SAP addressing the subject.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for one year. 

This solution is quite stable. 

We don't require that much support; it's all in the cloud and it's been pretty good. It's well supported I would say.

We used Power BI and Tableau, but they both do not offer the native integration and business content that SAP provides. SAP provides a lot of business content and templates which is quite handy when it comes to complex projects.

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

A team of consultants helped us with deployment — they were very helpful. As far as deployment is concerned, we followed an agile implementation model.

Deployment time varies depending on the project size and complexity. SAP has features like analytics, planning, predictive capabilities, simulation, and analytical application. All of these features are very good. They're all combined into one platform where everything can interact together.

Compute and storage features should be sold separately. 

Typically, compute and storage is sold separately because there are a lot of use cases. A lot of people ask for it because other competitive products offer it. If they could provide that, it would be very helpful.

If you're interested in using this solution, you have to be aware of the frequent changes and product improvement that occurs. Every month there's a new update. You need to be aware of that but at the same time, don't get carried away with all the new features. Keep track of the roadmap and what new updates are coming. It won't cause any problems, but as it updates so often, it's good to keep track of what new features will be available and which features you should implement.

SAP Analytics can be used as an all-in-one source. It can bring everything together: BI, predictive, planning, simulation — it can combine all of this into a single user interface. Other products have also done this, but SAP has done it very nicely. It's quite good, it's quite stable — I like it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. It combines all features into a single user interface, including planning, prediction, simulation, analytics application, and analytics or data dash boarding and reporting — I like it.

It is a comprehensive BI solution that provides reporting, planning, and predictive analytics in one solution. You don't have to buy three different products.

It is very flexible. It can be implemented very quickly. It has a lot of out-of-the-box scenarios that you can use for quick deployment.

It should have the flexibility for scoping the story and models. When you use it in a three-layer architecture, you struggle with the fact that you usually have just one SAP Analytics Cloud tenant, and you have to switch the connections, which might be an issue for bigger developments. For the development role, there should be an option to switch between development and production scenarios. 

I have been using this solution for a year. I am using its latest version.

It is definitely stable.

It is scalable. Many customers are using this solution. They usually have less than 100 users.

Their support is fine. Its information and support pages are also very organized.

It is a cloud solution. You don't have to install it. You just buy the license and activate the users.

Its licensing is on a monthly basis.

I would recommend this solution. Generally, their roadmap is full of good innovations. They focus a lot on things that can be improved and bring the improvements that you don't even realize that you need. They are great.

I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud a nine out of ten.

SAP ERP itself is not a product, it is a suite of products. There are multiple products within SAP ERP or the Business One suit. Analytics for Cloud is one of them. There are multiple other products that we could see if I had different modules. It depends on what module you are.

My primary use for SAP Analytics Cloud Planning is dashboard reporting, forecasting, budgeting, predictive analytics and so on.

SAP ERP products are mainly for business processes improvement.

The features that I have found most valuable with SAP ERP products are their good user interface, stability, functionality, and good interface options.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say their positioning. Effectively there are too many parts from SAP in the planning and consolidation space. If they want to position SAP Analytics Cloud for this space, they need to position it properly and make sure that the other products are also positioned alongside it in such a way that the customer doesn't get confused. That's one more supportive thing. Other than that, the scalability, stability and all that, need to be improved. They need a better scalability rate.

Additionally, SAP ERP could have more competitive pricing, more openness, more accessibility, more standard products, and more planned releases to the new features.

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for close to one year and SAP ERP for 15 years.

In terms of stability, SAP Analytics Cloud is still a relatively new product. From a stability point of view, I won't comment because it's recently in the market. I'm sure the new, upcoming releases will be in the right direction to make the product more stable.

In terms of SAP ERP products' scalability, I am a contractor, I don't work for a particular organization, so it depends on where you are implementing. It varies from 5,000 to 20,000 or even 100,000 people using the product.

In terms of numbers of users using SAP Analytics Cloud, it's not financial planning so it is relatively smaller, it may be around 500 users.

In terms of support, it has been really good. They have a good understanding of the product.

The SAP ERP products are not easy to install. But it has its own sequence of steps that we need to follow. But it's not that complicated either.

Generally, in terms of all SAP products, the licensing cost is at a slightly higher price. They need to make it more competitive.

I would recommend the SAP ERP and Analytics Cloud products for users who want to start using it. In general, on a scale of one to ten, I would give SAP ERP an eight.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP Analytics Cloud a seven.

I would like to see more standardization here.

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 it for publishing financial reports. 

The visualization feature is the most valuable. SAP Analytics Cloud is also very easy to use.

The security, authorization, and live connection to the back-office system features can be improved.

A business analyst colleague who creates complex financial management reports has mentioned that he wants to see more fact and visualization features. It would be helpful to have more visualization features to be able to prepare more stories or reports for executives. For example, Tableau has some visualization features that are not present in this solution. 

I have been using SAP Analytics Cloud for two years.

We experienced some upgrades and interruptions recently. I would say it has a 95% availability.

It is scalable. Agility and scalability are the benefits of the cloud solution. If I want to put 500 users tomorrow, I just simply add them. I don't have to worry about performance, service, memory, and all the other things.

We have between 50 to 100 users who are accessing SAP to see their reports. They need to see financial information. They might be viewing these reports on a weekly basis or a monthly basis.

We have created some tickets through our partner for some issues related to the maximum available fields, the number of lines to upload, or some restrictions related to the cloud. We get monthly upgrades on the cloud for functionality. In the next month's upgrade, thankfully, they will include the resolution of the problem. I would rate their technical support a seven out of ten.

We have used On-Premise BI, Webi business objects, SAP business objects, and Tableau. We moved to SAP because we recognize the value and advantage of SAP Cloud Analytics over other solutions.

The initial setup was simple. It took us a day to deploy it.

Initially, we started to use it ourselves for simple reports and simple uploads from Excel files. It took us less than a day to see a simple visualization of the report. In the next phase, it got more complicated in the sense that we implemented a single sign-on and live connection to the back-office systems. We had some SAP experts who helped us with what should be done.

It is not the most expensive one. You have to do the cost-of-ownership analysis and take a lot of things into consideration to come up with the conclusion that it is cheaper or not, but its price is reasonable. It provides value for money. 

SAP Analytics Cloud is an easy-to-use tool that can help you to analyze data. It also depends on the industry and what you want to use it for, but it is an easy tool. 

Before start using it for advanced reports, I would suggest spending a month learning this tool well. Because it is so easy to use, when you start using it for doing complex things in the beginning, you might realize that you haven't done it the right way because you didn't have the training. Don't get too enthusiastic about the ease of use of SAP. Do get the training and learn how to make proper reports, how to appropriately use the models, how to connect to on-premise systems, and how to implement live connections. After that, start building complex reports and use it for productive work.

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

The solution is used for planning and budgeting.

The SKU, the story build all are user- friendly. For the story build one just has to drag and drop it. And for the table, you just need some sort of selections and everything there.

There is plenty of room for improvement. They have different products, and you need to integrate all of them to have one functionality. For example, data extraction happens in Datasphere. Then it would be best if you had some connection between the Datasphere and the SAP Analytics Cloud to get the data, as this is causing headaches sometimes. The knowledge base and Jedox also could be more meaningful. I have tried to search for some specific knowledge base and technology base, and I didn't find them. I have learned it by trial and error.

There is room to improve the integrations between the different products. The AFS, and the Data action, need improvement. Sometimes they release new tools and updates, but not in my area.

I have been using the solution for twelve months.

It is a stable product. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Fourteen consultants are using the SAP Cloud for planning and budgeting and are impressed with it as they did not introduce any other tool. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

Since it is a stable tool we did not have to contact the technical support team.

The initial setup is a little difficult. It takes time to learn about the Datasphere and the SEB. Actually, I have joined an ongoing project, so I didn't know how much time it would take.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.