SAP Lumira Reviews

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.

The number one feature would probably be the geo map feature. I like it because my consultant company is starting to get a lot of business in the healthcare industry, and that's something that they like to see. They like to see their data spread out on a map. That's the direction that they're starting to go in, and Lumira offers you the ability to do that.

We're starting to get a lot more demo requests. We can create a demo for the client really easily in Lumira, because it's quick and easy and it's just drag and drop. Up until Lumira we were using Design Studio which takes a lot more coding and work to actually create something. It's an easier tool to use.

The ability to bring in a Lumira application inside of another SAP tool like Design Studio. I don't know if that's offered yet. Whatever you create in Lumira, it would be nice to have the option to import it into Design Studio or Webby, or vice versa.

I know for the geo map you have to have an account with Esri. It would be good if you have the license for the tool, you don't have to have a separate account with Esri for the geo mapping. It should be combined into one license.

I've used it for about a year.

We've had no issues with the performance.

Most of the data I've uploaded has been simple data, simple columns. I haven't had any data with any issues yet.

I haven't had to reach out to anybody for technical support.

It's one of the newer tools that SAP offered. It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy. It speeds up the process.

It was pretty simple. You download it, you extract a folder, and you run through the steps.

I feel like something's missing, but I can't put my hand on it what's missing, if that makes sense. It's a great tool though.

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!

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.

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.

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.

The ability to merge enriched data from different sources and also to connect to SAP HANA live data. It is also embedded in SAP HANA live analytics which cuts down time to deliver a solution to users. It also helps power users to design their own Lumira stories without any need for IT.

It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions.

I've been using it for three years.

There were some issues but SAP support stayed on to help throughout the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's very good.

It was straightforward.

We used a mixed team of vendor and in-house. We engaged a SAP Lumira product team from the get go.

Engage a SAP Lumira product team, and ask questions to understand how many deployment options there are available with SAP Lumira. Choose the option that fits your strategy and seek advice from the SAP Lumira support team on how best to deploy for maximum ROI.

We like the idea of being able to tell a story about our data and do some ad hoc data mining. It was like doing some dashboarding to show the sales across territories and actually see which ones were performing better than other ones and see which ones were outperforming. It was kind of an eye-opener.

We knew which stores were selling a lot, but we didn't know that they were actually outperforming all the other stores. When we were able to visualize it, it actually drove that home, and we were able to do that on the fly. It took a very short amount of time for us to do that, where someone goes through and spends time doing financial reporting and stuff along those lines, but they're typically usually using old technology (Excel) and it takes them a week to put that together. Within an hour or so, we had actually a better visualization of the data.

I would look at the geospatial part of it which doesn't seem work well as when you look at converting that for your maps, it a little cumbersome, and it's not as accurate. It doesn't seem to do it as accurately so it's needs to be done manually. It's more of the data prep part of it.

We've been using it for a couple months.

It seems to be stable. It had some in-crashing and sometimes it locked up on me. It's been a little slow crunching the data, but we're not running it on a HANA database, we're running it on a traditional system, so it's a little slower.

The more workload you throw, it seems to slow down, but that's typical for data mining.

When I was first getting started I was sending emails to tech support and they were quick at getting back, so they were pretty awesome with that. I was trying to connect it and do some of that type of stuff to our BW system, and they were really quick in responding. I would say they were doing a good job. Instead of calling them, I would send them an email, and within five - ten minutes I got a response back.

We also use SAP Business Objects, and we were using some other products like Explorer and we know that Lumira was on the cutting edge, but we've had some other people looking at another product called Tableau. We're a SAP house, so we thought that it would be better to stick with the SAP tools, and that Lumira's a much more robust tool, so we are looking at moving forward with it and rolling it out to our end users.

It was really straightforward. All you have to do is go and say that you want to connect, and you have to download some .DLLs, and once they're in place, you're connected. It's pretty straightforward. That's why we're looking at allowing some people to do their ad hoc reports, or visualization of data without contacting IT services.

I think the simplicity of putting it together or being able to visualize the data is the best thing, because once it's connected, it's drag-and-drop. You can then create your storyboards and it's pretty straightforward. If you're familiar with using any kind of program or tool, it's pretty straightforward to get the results that you need.

The only problem I had was just getting some of the data prepped. I would say they need to focus on getting that type of stuff improved.

You have to prep your data, and sometimes you have to change your field types, especially if you take your zip code and you try to convert that into geospatial so you can do a display of your sales on a map. It's not as straightforward as it could be, and it doesn't quite do a good enough job. You might be in the right state, but you may not be in at quite the right location. It's still better, it's still good, but there could be some more improvement there.