SAP Lumira Reviews

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.

The most valuable features are all of the analytical dashboards, which then pull real-time data.

We can prepare a summary and, with these dashboards, anybody can build it and they are all self-service tools. You don't really need to program and you don't need any high tech people to hand over the dashboards to the business. It's mainly user-friendly and a self-service tool.

We haven't actually done anything. We are just exploring. We are doing a couple of proof of concepts. We haven't realized anything in production.

We have something planned. I was given a glimpse of what we intend to do. We have a lot of data sitting on our database. We would like to deliver an analytical dashboard which really provides somebody about the performance of our sub-layer. We would like to take a look and see how our sub-layers are performing. What is the quality of the developers? Are they really meeting their deadlines? We have 100,000 sub-layers. If they don't meet their deadline, we don't either, so that's a very critical to our delivery date. These are some of the things we would like to build our dashboards and go from there.

One area where I would like to see improvement is the speed. It needs so much resources. I would like to see everything running on the server rather than having it separated between the Lumira server and Lumira desktop, with one flavor here, one flavor there. I would like to have everything in one place, so that you don't really need to worry about having a lot of resources on the PCs, especially if you want to deploy the solution to business users. If it's not a high tech company, we don't give them any PCs with 10 TB of memory.

I'm rating it a five. When they improve its performance, it can go to seven or eight. If they add even more drill-down features and so on, it can be a 10.

We just started using Lumira, only in the last couple of months.

I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data. There is definitely a lot of opportunity to improve on the performance run.

I don't know because we're not there yet. We are just in the very, very pre-evaluation phase, so I cannot really comment on that.

I haven't used technical support yet. We are a premium customer of SAP. We have a good relationship but Lumira is just one of the tiny products we use. We have quite a few business tools. We do get pretty good support and we follow the same process and methodology. Also, we have very good contact from our technical quality managers if we need to escalate and get good support. I think we are covered on the support front.

In the past, we used some of the other reporting tools, but they all needed a lot of technical expertise. Those are not true self-service tools. You need to have a shadow IT team in the business for some of them. With Lumira, I don’t expect any IT guy to utilize the tools. Once you get all the data into the backend and define all the views and so on, it’s up to the business how they want to consume and how they want to design their dashboard: What kind of filter? What kind of measurements they want to see? It's up to them, but I think that they're covered.

We were all sitting in a conference room, four of us, and we watched a YouTube video, which is eight minutes long. After that, we were able to build a couple of dashboards by ourselves, just from that one watch and learn session. It is so easy to learn.

Setup was not an issue but there was an issue with the license key because we had already bought Lumira. It took some time for them to make the software available and give us the license key. It took a good two weeks to go back and forth between us and SAP. That was not a problem. It's just a simple application flaw.

I think rapid development, geospatial coding, using it to connect to multiple data sources are all good selling points for it.

That's important to our company because it enables self-service or data as a service for the end-user community.

We've streamlined our tool selection. A lot of other groups within the company have used other products, Excel, Power BI, Tableau, and then Lumira came into play. Being an SAP company, we're trying to have people gravitate towards one common tool and platform, so I think it increased the efficiency just from the training perspective, the support perspective, and also just aligning with the overall IT strategy.

I think there is room for improvement in connectivity, basic connectivity across data sources or datasets. HANA is a new set that we could connect to, but there are limitations for blending data with multiple sources with HANA.

Same thing on the BW side, there could probably be some improvement with the run time or the ease of connecting and bringing bigger datasets back to the tool itself.

Another connectivity option or issue is, if there's 100 HANA views out there, the end users don't know the technical or the common names to go to. I think giving some more intuitive way to select the connections in use would be a better feature.

I'm rating it a seven because of the deficiencies with connectivity across the BW and HANA platforms. There's different version mismatches that bring down the rating.

With the geospatial coding for latitude and longitude, there are deficiencies if you have a column, a specific one for latitude, and one for longitude, you really need to concatenate it together for the UI or the Lumira application to leverage it. When exporting basic models that you're using to a PDF file, it renders blank PDF pages to us, so that capability was useless.

I've been using this solution for about two years.

We definitely encountered issues with stability. We found a lot of bugs throughout the amount of time that we've been using the product. As we find the bug, it's typically service pack related or related to the source system that you're connecting to. I think that it is a big deal for my company.

We don't really have Lumira in production at this point, we've got a lot of POCs and we're building the hype around the training and the use case of it. I think some of these defects actually have prevented us from getting it into production at this point.

Scalability is more on the configuration side. We've installed the vanilla installation on the tool. Yes, scalability is typically when we get some end users kicking the tires and playing with the system, we find some bugs or defects and then we need to modify or potentially enhance some of the custom or vanilla settings used when it was installed. Put it this way: These are typical issues with BusinessObjects.

On a scale of one to five, with five being outstanding and one being horrible, I'd say technical support rates a four.

I didn't previously use a different solution but other people in the functional team did. The switch was a result of a corporate IT initiative to standardize on one set of tools.

For the basics, if you are connecting to an Excel file, most end users could connect easily. When it comes to connecting to BW, HANA, Universe, something more complex, there's a steeper learning curve.

When you connect to HANA, for example, if you don't have your HANA username and password then you need to go work with a separate team potentially to go get that. An end user would typically would know the channels or the resources to work with. However, I can see a scenario where you connect to HANA but also want to blend that with an Excel file. That feature functionality doesn't seem to be incorporated with the current release of Lumira that we have.

Pushing to the BI platform when we did our install in our sandbox dev and quality environment, we ran into multiple issues with the install. I worked SAP on some switches and we still don't have it fully resolved.

It's cool that you can download a 30-day trial. I'd like to see that maybe more of an extended trial.

The ability to upload a spreadsheet and immediately start using it. It's more intuitive than a pivot table because you can dump a spreadsheet in it and it sort of figures out what relationships work and what relationships don't. I think it helps for people who aren't necessarily predisposed to inherently grasping data.

It gave me the ability to see things that I otherwise wouldn't see from a pivot table.

I think probably what I was trying to do at the time was create some sort of map if you will. I work a lot with freight data, transportation data and I've been trying to find a solution to show volumes and distances out of a specific point so if we've got a distribution center in Dallas, Texas, something that I can just drop the data in and by zip code it will show you know a heat map of the zip codes that we're shipping to and don't recall the mirror being able to do that.

I went in there for a couple of hours one day and just explored.

I didn't experience any issues with the performance.

I was testing it so I didn't need to scale it.

Most of what I do is in Excel and Access. So Lumira and the other options I looked at were really to supplement that rather than to replace anything else that I was using.

I seem to recall it being pretty simple.

It seemed to be fairly user friendly. I've also done trials on Tableau and Spotfire before and I would say I had limited interactions with both of those as well, it's probably on par with both of those as far as being able to get in there and use it without a whole lot of you know training and tutorials and that sort of thing. It's pretty user friendly from what I recall, but I just didn't really get down into the real details of it.

It was comparable to the other solutions that I looked at as far as being able to just get in there and dump some data in and go.

The ability to render and visualize data across time or organizational hierarchies. It provides better, more robust ability to visualize data than in Excel or some of the other desktop tools that are out there, providing users the ability to identify actionable trends in their data sets that they normally wouldn't see, like in a spreadsheet or tabular data, a report.

It's a little bit less of a dashboard, and more of a discovery tool within the data, being able to slice and dice your data in various ways and then render that visually, rather than within a strict spreadsheet.

We can visualize the data across different timelines, across different organizations. Whatever way you're trying to look at it, you can see the trends a little bit easier than you can in its specific data points in a spreadsheet.

We use it for things like planning major holidays, looking at resources required by hour based on things like traffic or sales or other important events that we may need to take into consideration. We can also provide some executive guidance on sales trends and forecasted results for the end of the day, the end of the week. We use it for a little bit of short term forecasting from time to time.

I would say a better integration with the Business Objects platform. To develop the views, it's not user friendly. It's a great tool for developers to create the information model for Lumira. Once that has been developed then it's easier for the users to then go in and manipulate the data that's within that view, but it's not a great tool for the end user to poll data, to cleanse data, to merge data. All that, it's much better for a developer tool, but for the end users to then dynamically interact with it once the developer had built the framework for it.

I don't see that this would add a lot of value to our buyers. But for store operations, looking at how things have been running in the stores, it could be a good tool. People that are interested and have a passion for analyzing data, this is a great tool for them. Again it's not a tool for everybody, and not a tool for probably most senior executives. It is a pretty analytical tool and it requires that kind of mind set, either on the business side or on the IT side.

I've used it for three years.

The updates are easy, they get pulled down directly from SAP. I haven't personally encountered any bugs or defects within it.

We haven't had any issues.

It's not a tool for the entire enterprise. It's a tool for people that are used to doing data analysis, so financial planners, inventory or merchandise planners.

6/10 - I haven't really had to reach out to SAP much for any support on it.

We use Webi but people wanted to see was really columnar data. I started using Lumira to try and demonstrate different methods to render some of the same data in ways that would expose trends that weren't obvious within a spreadsheet or within Webi. Once I started doing that I got some other departments interested in viewing data the same way.

The installation initially of the client was very straight forward. I did it myself. As far as if you have HANA you can't install it on HANA, but the integration with Business Objects directly is still not great. It's better as a client on people's desktops than on a server based component. For me that's a little bit of a limitation that's been challenging. It does make it a little less appealing to roll out for the entire enterprise.

I would say expect to do a number of proof of concepts for various departments before finding a successful partner to implement with. As a client it's great, as an application, I would expect as an application with Business Objects, that integration is still not great. From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting. But as a client it's awesome.

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.

The dynamic creation of dashboards and the quick visualization is the key feature. It provides quick visualizations for reports. As it's hard to explain our reports, sometimes management miss the point, so the visualization is a lot better than a table that we typically show. It's the visualization that helps them understand what we report on.

The program helps us understand quickly the market so we're seeing what is being built and how much data they are using.

I am happy with the product, but they could improve in the discovery of the product.

I've been using it for the last three years.

I'm happy and don't have any issues.

The data we had was stored fine. It was nothing bad. It was okay. It was very large. We kind of summarized a lot of data so we are okay with that. We don't contract too many issues because our benefits are smaller.

It was OK. We are not uncomfortable because a lot of the recommendations, and I don't see any problems.

This is more user friendly than what we used previously.

Initially when we got the solution it wasn't straightforward, but slowly it has caught up with the market.