SAP, A Simple Review
So, you are considering SAP.
You’ll be wondering if it’s a good choice for you, if its feature set compares well to other options on the market, and if it is priced affordably enough for what you get.
This article will break all that down for you and more.
Plus, at the end of the article you’ll find links to alternatives to SAP as well as our top picks for the options in this category.
Or, just go straight to Our top picks for Best analytics tools
Without further ado, let’s get started.
SAP Features
SAP Analytics Cloud brings together analytics and planning to help you derive unique insights. You can accelerate deployments with pre-packaged best practices for your industry. SAP allows you to simulate any scenario and generate plans from predictions. It drives agile business decisions, helping you scale faster.
Here are some exclusive features of SAP:
Analytics and BI: SAP’s intuitive self-service analytics helps you explore data across the organization and deliver insights at the decision point. You can use self-service data modelling to set KPIs and hierarchies while automating data. Additionally, SAP offers interactive visualizations to discover insights and inspire audiences.
Data Engineering: SAP ensures your data is analytics-ready before jumping into model creation. It allows you to efficiently explore, prep, catalogue and pipeline your data. Moreover, you can use over 30 Interactive visualizations to identify patterns, trends and distributions within your data set.
True Team Transparency: SAP provides a central source of truth for your projects and makes results tangible and comprehensive. Additionally, it simplifies model ops to generate a real and maximum business effect. With SAP, you can instil confidence in your work using explainable AI.
Enterprise Planning: SAP drives better business outcomes by creating and linking your financial and operational plans. You can use predictive planning to anticipate business needs and stay agile with forecasting and machine learning. Moreover, SAP allows you to modify versions of the planning model for data-driven budgeting.
Composable Analytics: SAP allows you to tailor analytics and planning applications to meet unique business requirements. You can increase application developer productivity with reusable widgets and flexible APIs. SAP enables users to easily customize and compose analytics applications.
Prebuilt Business Content: SAP offers prebuilt best-practice content packages for businesses to quickly help them get started with data analytics. You can leverage end-to-end tailored packages to work with recommended SAP data sources. Additionally, it helps you realize results quickly by accessing documentation of KPIs.
Collaboration and Governance: With SAP, you can promote real-time communication and the widespread reuse of networks. SAP’s project-based framework allows you to structure and organize all the work relevant to a given use case. SAP facilitates collaboration regardless of your team member’s data science skill level.
ESG Reporting and Sustainability: SAP helps you deliver environmental, social, and economic impact with actionable insights and accurate reporting. You can deliver automated and auditable ESG reporting by analyzing your business data. SAP allows you to drive targeted action for sustainability performance.
SAP Pricing
SAP offers 2 Pricing options for its data analytics platform.
The “Business Intelligence” plan is priced at $36/user/month and offers automation, actionable insights and augmented analytics.
The “Planning” plan has an on-demand pricing quote and offers integrated planning, forecast automation and scenario modelling.
SAP Discounts and Coupons
SAP currently does not offer any discounts or coupons for its data analytics software.
SAP Free Trial
SAP currently offers a 30 Day free trial for its data analytics tools.
SAP, A short how-to guide
This guide is designed to give you an overview of how SAP works and how to use it effectively. After completing this guide, you will be able to:
• Download and install SAP
• Launch SAP and open a workflow
• Configure nodes in a workflow
• Execute a workflow
• Export and share a workflow
Installing SAP
Before you can use SAP, you need to download and install it on your computer. SAP is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
To download SAP, go to the SAP website and click the Download button.
On the next page, select the edition of SAP that you want to install. For this tutorial, we will be using the Community Edition.
Click the Download button and select the installer for your operating system. Once the download is complete, launch the installer and follow the prompts to install SAP.
Once you have SAP installed, launch the application and you should see the “Welcome to SAP” dialog.
From the “Welcome to SAP” dialog, you can either choose to open an existing workflow or create a new workflow. For this tutorial, we will be creating a new workflow.
Creating and exporting a new workflow
To create a new workflow, click on the “Create new workflow” button.
This will take you to the workflow editor, which is where you will be spending most of your time in SAP. The workflow editor is where you will be adding nodes and connecting them together to create your data analysis workflow.
Click on a data set to start analyzing it. You can right-click on a set and select combine to superimpose it with another relevant data set. You can save intermediate results by simply exporting the report while analyzing.
Once you login to your SAP analytics cloud account, you’ll be asked to import data sets relevant to your businesses. You can do so by going to “File” and selecting import.
Once done, click on the imported data set to start analyzing it. You can merge multiple data sets or divide them into worksheets for thorough reporting.
Once you’ve derived valuable insights, you can export the report and start formulating campaigns.