Transform your analytics together with S/4HANA migration: plan SAP Analytics Cloud deployment

Efficient BI and analytics environment is the key to accurate reporting and right business decisions with minimal manual effort spent on data preparation for analysis. Migration to SAP S/4HANA makes the companies rethink analytical capabilities and setup. What is SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), why does your business need it and how can you build your analytics journey? In our blog series, we are looking into it.

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

The SAP Analytics Cloud solution combines BI, augmented and predictive analytics, and planning capabilities into one cloud environment delivered through SaaS model. To put it simply, SAC allows to:

• Develop dashboards based directly on S/4HANA data without replicating data and tedious data cleaning - thus minimising calculation error risks

• Enable connections with non-SAP data sources 

• Build flexible planning models that take multiple variables into account

• Interact with the dashboard using human language - solution will build customised charts for you based on your questions

• Prepare and distribute dynamic presentations tailored for different stakeholder groups (including C-Suite) powered by SAP Digital Boardroom. 

Why SAP Analytics Cloud?

It takes data directly from your SAP S/4HANA and equips business teams with user-friendly tools to build dashboards. You save time and money as you avoid additional data replication and using extra environments for  processing flows or maintaining business metadata and authorisations. You can use resources saved from routine data operations on designing more insightful analytics, communicating with stakeholders and taking concrete actions based on analysis findings. 

How is SAP Analytics Cloud positioned in the SAP environment?

SAP Analytics Cloud is an analytics layer of SAP’s Business Technology Platform that can be connected with SAP S/4HANA, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, as well as other SAP and external solutions. In S/4HANA environments, SAP Analytics Cloud will be a preferred analytics tool. From the planning side, it replaces SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC). From the reporting side, it replaces SAP BusinessObjects (BO) and, in some cases, SAP Business Warehouse (BW). As an additional highlight, SAP Analytics Cloud also works with Group Reporting consolidation solutions data.

What are prerequisites for getting SAC?

SAC can be connected to cloud and on-premise versions of SAP S/4HANA. Once SAC is taken into use, end users can access it from the web browser - no additional desktop installations are needed. 

How to get started?

Since SAC is a Cloud based service, it minimises multiple technical challenges and allows your organisation to focus on BI strategy and user onboarding journey. Using SAC report templates can also help you to focus on addressing most important questions. 

There are multiple aspects that you should consider when planning your migration to SAP S/4HANA:

• Analyse your current BI landscape across multiple reporting areas (for example, budget and sales planning, taxation analytics) and map it with SAC opportunities

• Plan deployment approach to ensure minimal IT costs, low maintenance, and security features.

• Define your as-is and to-be data integration architecture

• Draw a long-term analytics implementation roadmap balancing short-term and long-term goals

• Plan a role-based user onboarding journey that covers all relevant teams within your organisation - from business controllers to C-suite. 

Our team can help you with many questions from analysing your current BI landscape to the scaling up of your analytics potential in S/4HANA.

This blog is a part of PwC blog series on SAP Analytics Cloud deployment