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.
The most valuable feature for us is that it allows us to generating complex charts and dashboards on the fly.
It's very easy to use. For example, even for us non-developers who don't know how to code or to handle databases, we're able to use Lumira. All we've needed is knowledge of some of the basic functionalities of it.
There are several features that competitors have in the reporting tools market, such as Qlikview, Crystal Reports, and Dashboard Designer. SAP should make Lumira more comparable and competitive to those solutions.
I've been using it for approximately one-and-a-half years.
There have been no issues with the deployment.
There have been some issues. The product itself is going through the improvement stages and the newer versions seem to be more stable.
We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.
8/10. Customer service is good, but it still can be further improved in terms of response times with issue fixes.
I've been using SAP technologies for the last six years. I have used Dashboard Designer, Crystal Reports and Webi reports to build our dashboards, but as it was something new and easy to use, we tried using Lumira for our POCs. Now, it seems to be one of the best SAP dashboard/chart/data analysis tools available.
The initial setup was not too complex, but no one was aware of it which increased its complexity. Now, it is very easy to deploy and use.
We implemented it on our own. SAP is doing a good job, and I am sure they will work on making implementations better.
SAP Lumira Standard Edition is approximately $185 per user.
It is really easy to use and provides the best results. It can really help any organization/domain to build their own dashboards easily and to analyze complex data.
