Stories, Models, Data

SAP Analytics Cloud has three fundamental components: data, models, and stories.

Data
The first step to analytics is getting access to your data. This data may reside in a spreadsheet, a
large database, or an application in the cloud or on-premise. SAP Analytics Cloud can connect to all
these different sources of data so you can perform the analysis you need to gain valuable insights
and make important data-driven decisions. You can upload spreadsheets easily into SAP Analytics
Cloud for analysis but for connections to larger, more complex data sources, more steps are needed.
Click here to learn more.

Model
Once SAP Analytics Cloud has access to your data, you need to create a data model for the data
source so that SAP Analytics Cloud knows how to query for the data and make it available for
analysis. For example, your database has a great deal of information in it, but you only need
Customer Name, Product Name, and Total Sales for your analysis. When creating a data model, you
specify the dimensions, measures, and other semantics you need to facilitate your analysis and data
storytelling.

Measures are numeric values that can support mathematical calculations such as Total Sales or
Number of Orders. Dimensions can be numeric or text and are descriptive values such as a Profit
Center, Date, and Sales Manager.

Creating a model is called data modeling and is done using the Modeler, usually by advanced users
with knowledge of the underlying data source. Click here to learn more.

Stories
Now you are ready to tell a story with your data. In an SAP Analytics Cloud story, you can turn your
data into visualizations like charts, tables, geo maps, and more. Data visualization aids the analysis
process by presenting data visually, making it easier to get actionable insights to help answer your
business questions. A story can be designed as reports or dashboards to help with your planning or
analysis. Click here to learn more.
Smart Features
When analyzing data in a chart or table, you probably often have questions like, “Why did this value
decrease?”, “What is causing this variance?” or “What is influencing this metric?”. To get the insights
needed to answer these questions, you would typically have to spend hours performing manual data
discovery. SAP Analytics Cloud augmented analytics helps by generating automated insights
powered by artificial intelligence and machine learnings to help you find the answers you need. These
augmented analytics capabilities are referred to as smart features, and they allow users to:

 Ask questions in a conversational manner with instant results explained in natural language

 Automatically discover meaningful insights and jump-start the creation of a dashboard

 Use machine learning algorithms to automatically reveal relationships in data, hidden patterns,
and outliers in your data

 Predict potential outcomes and forecasts, and populate results back into your plan at any level
for increased accuracy

Search to Insight
Search to Insight allows you to search for answers to questions about your data using natural,
everyday language. Simply type what you would like to know from your data – such as “Show Sales
Revenue for by Sales Manager:” – into the search box, and SAP Analytics Cloud will analyze your
data and return an answer.

Smart insights
Gain instant answers to your questions around your data with Smart Insights. Smart Insights runs
statistical algorithms on the underlying data to analyze and uncover the top contributors influencing
the selected data point or variance. The results are explained in natural language with visualizations
to help you understand the whys of your data and help you make informed decisions.

Smart Discovery
Think of Smart Discovery as your own personal business analyst. Smart Discovery automates the
data exploration and discovery process to help you discover new or unknown relationships in your
data. You can clearly define the context of a business question by specifying the measure or
dimension you want to know more about. Story pages are generated with results to help you
understand the main business drivers behind core KPIs . After running Smart Discovery, you can
simulate numeric targets using the results of the key influencer analysis.

Smart Predict
Smart Predict helps you answer business questions that need predictions or predictive forecasts to
plan for future business evolutions. Smart Predict automatically learns from your historical data and
finds the best relationships or patterns of behavior to generate predictions for future events, values,
and trends. These predictions can be used to enhance and automate decision making.

Three types of predictive scenarios are available in Smart Predict: Classification, Regression,
and Times Series Predictive Scenarios.

Type Description Example

Used to rank a population and assign a Who is likely to buy this product with
Classification
probability that an event will happen regards to buying habits

Used to find relationships between How much would a customer spend

Regression
variables describing events on my e-commerce on average

What are the expected sales by

Used to forecast future values of a
Time Series product per region for the next 4
measure
weeks

Time Series Forecasting

The Time Series Forecasting feature performs advanced statistical analysis to generate forecasts by
analyzing trends, cycles, and outliers. Users can select between different time series algorithms
based on their needs. This functionality assists business users in making precise data-driven
decisions, especially when combined with business planning processes.

Smart Grouping
Smart Grouping allows you to visualize clusters of data on scatter plots and bubble charts by
automatically grouping data points together based on similar properties. This feature helps you
explore data points with the flexibility in defining the attributes to be considered, and tailor business
decision to certain groups. Click here to learn more.

Planning Features
SAP Analytics Cloud Planning features help businesses set goals and strategic plans, analyze
budgets, set allocations, compare budget, actuals, and forecasts, and crowdsource plans across
departments.

Here is an overview of the core Planning features in SAP Analytics Cloud:

 Plan budget, and forecast: Deliver timely plans, budgets, forecasts, and reports with greater
speed and accuracy in one application

 Analytics: Make end-to-end decisions across the business in real-time with built-in business
intelligence and analytics

 Predict: Automate forecasts at any level to save time and gain trusted results with predictive
analytics and machine learning

 Scenario Planning: Simulate multiple outcomes to the impact of your business drivers

 Collaboration: Share and discuss plans across the business with built-in collaboration
features

 Process Management: Create seamless planning workflows to streamline processes with the
Calendar feature

SAP Analytics Cloud for planning provides tools for planning and analysis, collaborative budgeting,
long-range strategic planning, work-force capital planning, and predictive planning and scenario
modeling.

Enterprise Planning | SAP Analytics Cloud | SAP Community

Core Applications and Features
Pre-built Business Content Packages for BI and Planning
SAP Analytics Cloud has pre-built analytics content for BI and Planning by line-of-business and
industry created by SAP and SAP Partners. These are free to download, customize and configure on
customer tenants and accessed through the SAP Analytics Cloud Content Network. Leverage these
ready-to-use technical sample templates and industry and line-of-business specific content to
accelerate and inspire your content creation. Click here to learn more.
Digital Boardroom
SAP Digital Boardroom lets you create and deliver real-time interactive boardroom presentations.
Dashboards are presented on large touch screens, creating a visually interactive and collaborative
experience. Decision makers can adjust drivers on-screen instantly and simulate the impact of
decision and predict future outcomes. It connects to SAP and non-SAP applications to provide a
single source of truth about key business metrics across all lines of business, enabling executives to
address ad hoc questions and act in the moment with live data. Click here to learn more.

Analytic Applications
Analytic Applications enables professional designers to use advanced scripting to create custom,
complex applications to satisfy unique and advanced business use-cases. Scripting allows the
application designer to define the relationship between different elements on the page, and to guide
users and adjust widget behavior based on users’ expectations.

The major difference compared to stories is that in Analytic Applications, you can configure the
behavior of the UI elements with a set of specific script API events and specify which actions should
take place when events are triggered. This flexibility lets you create a variety of Analytic Applications,
ranging from simple static dashboards to highly customized analytic applications with numerous
options to browse and navigate data. Click here to learn more.

Analytics Catalog
The Analytics Catalog is a single access point for content published to users and teams within SAP
Analytics Cloud. Your organization’s content creators can publish the stories that they’d like you to
use to the Catalog, which is one of the tabs on the Home screen. Because a special permission is
needed to publish content to the Catalog, you’ll know that the Catalog content has been vetted by a
content creator.

Each item published to the Catalog is displayed as a card that users can open to access the
underlying content. The following content types can be published and displayed in the Catalog:

 Stories

 Analytic Applications
  Digital Boardroom presentations

 Models

 Datasets

 Uploaded SAP Analytics Cloud files

 Content Links

MS Office Integration
SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office, enables users to connect and import data from one
or more models seamlessly from SAP Analytics Cloud into Microsoft Excel. The integration allows
you to combine the power of Microsoft Excel and SAP Analytics Cloud analytical tools and
functionalities to format, transform, and enrich your data in one platform. Click here to learn more.
Data Analyzer
Data Analyzer allows you to query your data directly and perform ad-hoc analysis in a pivot-table
style analysis view. You can analyze the data for leadership based on a business hypothesis, find
insights and trends, or get a structured view of the company’s financial performance across different
dimensions.

A big advantage of Data Analyzer is that you can analyze the data directly without having to create a
model or story in SAP Analytics Cloud. SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Live queries, SAP HANA
Live views, and SAP Analytics Cloud models are supported. Click here to learn more.

Mobile
SAP Analytics Cloud is available for mobile. With the SAP Analytics Cloud mobile app for iOS and
Android devices, you have easy access to your analytics while on the go. Responsive story pages are
optimized for mobile devices and automatically adjusts visualizations to fit any screen size to create a
seamless transition from desktop to mobile. Click here to learn more.