In this blog post, I’d like to go over the top 10 features of SAP Analytics Cloud. We’re seeing that SAC is becoming more mature and offers quite a few interesting features, such as Data Discovery, Smart Insight, Search Insight (Natural Language), Explorer Mode, and more. Below is my top 10 list of SAP Analytics Cloud features, in no particular order.
Smart Insight
A feature you can activate with a single click for most visualizations. This allows the SAC Engine to determine which elements are key factors influencing the figures in your visualization. For example, this could be a specific month that stands out in terms of revenue or a specific product that contributes the most to the margin. The great thing is that Smart Insight is also dynamic, so when you apply a filter or perform a drill-down, the Smart Insight updates accordingly. In addition, you can apply Smart Insight to other Smart Insights. This makes it a very useful feature for data discovery that you can easily access as a viewer.
Explorer Mode
Explorer Mode can also be activated with a single click and is another handy feature for applying Data Discovery. Explorer Mode allows you to quickly filter by any dimension in the model. In addition, you can quickly change the context of your visualization by using different metrics and dimensions. You can save Explorer views that you want to reuse. As a viewer, you can save the Story as a bookmark so that the next time you open it, it will load in the state you last used—including Explorer views—but with updated data. As the Story designer, you can also define Explorer views that are then available to everyone.
Drill Down
A third way to perform data discovery in your SAC Story is to drill down through a specific hierarchy. Well-known examples of hierarchies include an organizational hierarchy, a time hierarchy, and a product hierarchy. These hierarchies must be defined in the SAC Model before they can be used in a visualization of your SAC Story. Best practice is to create a duplicate of every field that needs to be included in a hierarchy, so that the mapping continues to work smoothly even if changes are made to your source query (for example, a query on the universe). For BusinessObjects users who want to use a Live Universe query to create a SAC Story, a custom hierarchy must be defined in the universe.
Hyperlink with filter
A fourth way to dive deeper into the data is through a hyperlink filter. This allows you to filter another tab or the entire story from a data point, or to create a hyperlink to an external website, with the hyperlink inheriting the value of the data point. In the example below, this is a tab with detailed data that is filtered based on the selected item. The designer must define the hyperlink so that it can be used by the Viewer.
Linked Analysis
A feature that's somewhat similar to this is Linked Analysis. It allows you to filter one or more other visualizations from a single visualization (charts or input controls).
Variance
With a Variance, you can easily see the difference between various data points in visualizations where you’re comparing two values. Viewers can customize how this difference is displayed (bars, numbers, percentages). Viewers can also add a new Variance themselves.
Time Intelligence
This is a handy feature that becomes available when you use a date field in your model. Because this feature makes designing a SAC Story so much easier, I recommend always including a date field in your model that corresponds to the time period you want to visualize. If you want to keep the data more aggregated, you can, for example, choose to transform all days in the month to the last day of the month. The Time Intelligence functions are useful in several ways. First, for visualizations to display various Running Sum variants such as Year To Date, Quarter To Date, and Month To Date. Second, to easily apply time filters to your Story or individual visualizations—for example, Current Year or a combination of Current Quarter and Previous Quarter. Third, you can create calculated fields using Time Intelligence—such as “Previous Year”—which you can then reuse throughout your entire SAC Story. A viewer of an SAC Story can also add comparisons with previous periods to visualizations that use a time dimension.
Search to Insight
This feature allows you to answer your analytical questions within your model using natural language. The answers are displayed in a visualization and are based on the names of metrics and dimensions. If you’re not sure what’s available in the model, you can still call up the list of metrics and dimensions. You can then click on these items to ask a natural language question. You can copy the result to your Story to further optimize the visualization there if needed. Of course, some caution is warranted, as you need to be able to place the data in the correct context.
Thresholds
A Threshold is essentially a form of conditional formatting, such as revenue compared to a target. However, compared to Web Intelligence, this feature is more comprehensive. In WebI, it can only be applied to tables by default. In SAC, it can also be applied to visualizations, and the Threshold is automatically recalculated whenever a drill-down or filter is applied. Additionally, if a new visualization is created using a metric for which a Threshold has already been defined, that Threshold is automatically applied. This latter feature can, however, be disabled.
ESRI map
The ability to add a map as a visualization to your SAC Story can provide added value. To create a map, you need a geographic dimension. You can base this dimension on countries, provinces, regions, and place names. Whether a location is recognized by SAC depends on the size of the location and the country. It’s better to work with GPS coordinates. That’s always 100% accurate, and you automatically get a hierarchy with it. It’s also possible to overlay multiple layers in the map visualization. In the example below, a layer for Sales Revenue and a layer for Margin have been defined. You can then drill down on both layers. It’s also possible to integrate freely available layers from the ESRI Community into the map visualization. For example, the ZIP code areas of the Netherlands are freely available in 6-digit, 5-digit, or 4-digit formats.
Conclusion
In addition to these top 10 features, SAC certainly offers a number of other interesting features, such as Forecasting (plus R Visualizations) and Smart Discovery (SAC automatically creates a Story for you based on metrics and dimensions that you consider important). Compared to WebI, SAC offers much greater interactivity and data discovery capabilities. Thanks to its unique and comprehensive functionality, SAC is well-positioned to compete with similar tools on the market.
