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Analyse, Plan and Predict all in one fully Cloud platform
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Low cost with fast return on investment
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Automatic updates and roadmap
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Fully secure
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Integrates with Microsoft Office
Great decisions start with numbers everyone can trust. SAP Analytics Cloud brings your planning, reporting and analysis together in one place, giving your whole team a clear, up to date view of how the business is performing. With Codestone alongside you, it becomes the place your people turn to for answers, so conversations move quickly from what the numbers say to what you’ll do next.
What is SAP Analytics Cloud?
SAP Analytics Cloud, often shortened to SAP SAC, is SAP’s cloud platform for reporting, dashboards, planning and predictive analysis, all working from a live connection to your SAP data. That live connection is what makes it so powerful. Because the platform reads the same records your finance and operations teams are posting to, everyone sees the latest figures as they happen, and there’s never any doubt about which version you’re looking at. Codestone helps you set up that connection and shape your reporting around your business, so the insight you need is always right there when you need it.
SAP Analytics Cloud, often shortened to SAP SAC, is SAP’s cloud platform for reporting, dashboards, planning and predictive analysis, all working from a live connection to your SAP data. That live connection is what makes it so powerful. Because the platform reads the same records your finance and operations teams are posting to, everyone sees the latest figures as they happen, and there’s never any doubt about which version you’re looking at. Codestone helps you set up that connection and shape your reporting around your business, so the insight you need is always right there when you need it.
Benefits of SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP Analytics Cloud is a
fully cloud dashboarding and reporting tool
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Access anywhere, anytime
Anytime, anywhere, any device. Access SAP Analytics Cloud using various devices, including laptops, PCs and smartphones. Easy-to-reach for everyone in the team.
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Beautiful dashboards including IBCS/Hichert
Data story-telling and auto generated visual exploration. Data visualisations and highly customisable dashboards. Business owners and users can access all relevant data displayed attractively and intuitively.
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Access interactive analysis & Smart assistants
Connect SAP Analytics Cloud users in a chat or using comments to make the decision-making process more accurate. Leverage the Smart Assist technology to give your team a way to find answers and understand what drives your business in less time.
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Comprehensive planning capabilities & analysis
SAP Analytics Cloud converges machine learning and predictive analytics-based features to help you plan accurately, quickly. Effortlessly monitor the plan in real-time, and create strategic alignment across all departments. Make better end-to-end planning decisions utilising features such as financial modelling, automated reporting, allocations, scenario modelling and intelligent insights.
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SAP Analytics Cloud predictive analytics
Gain a proactive, forward-looking approach rather than a reactive one. Stay agile and anticipate your business needs with SAP Analytics Cloud’s own inbuilt machine learning algorithm. Create and compare predictive models, determine patterns in your historical data and gain a competitive advantage.
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Powerful and live integration with SAP; e.g., SAP BW/4Hana
With its seamless integration capabilities, SAP Analytics Cloud allows businesses to make all changes in one, single location in the cloud. Users can now achieve value from their data without disrupting current processes or performing large data migrations.
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Business content for LoBs and Industries
Prebuilt best-practice business content packages. End-to-end customisable packages that are designed to connect with SAP data sources across lines of business. Industry best practices from SAP business process experts for analytics and planning.
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Connect with Microsoft Office Applications
SAP Analytics Cloud Microsoft Office add-in enables you to use all core analysis functions. Analyse and visualise your data directly in Excel and enrich your formulas and functions. Connecting SAP Analytics with Microsoft Office Applications streamlines your business.
SAP Analytics Cloud
Management Reporting
SAP Analytics Cloud builds reports, with data coming from all over, capturing insights in real-time from your business activities, budget forecasting data, and even massive datasets.
- Break down silos
- Get insights fast
- Mobile access
- Real time analytics and data
- Data visualisation
Planning
Experience collaborative enterprise planning at its best. No more silos. No more endless consolidation efforts. Leverage SAP’s end-to-end solution with powerful features to unite your organisation with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.
Make end-to-end decisions with confidence, in one single workflow from planning to insights. Drive better business outcomes and gain full alignment across all business areas with extended planning and analysis in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Streamline your process with predictive analytics workflow, what-if scenarios, value driver trees, allocations, and advanced calculations.
- Annual Budgeting
- Sales / revenue planning
- Capital expenditure planning
- Headcount / staffing
- Expense planning
- Cash flow planning
- Planning is for all, i.e. HR, Marketing, Supply Chain, Manufacturing,
- Sales – not just Finance
Predictive Analytics
Analytics leverage data that is managed, mined, cleansed, and transformed, to anticipate trends and outcomes. Analytics looks forward, using data mining, modelling, and machine learning to answer the ‘why’, to make more accurate predictions about the future.
Analytics leverage these insights to support businesses in anticipating and predicting trends and outcomes, steering organisations to make better decisions, stay competitive, and become more agile.
- Predictive & Conversational Analytics
- Data Story-telling and Autogenerated Visual exploration
- Statistical Modelling and Data mining
- Contextualise Insights – ‘Why Insights’
- Data Alerts
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence and augmented analytics capabilities help you to evaluate and predict business outcomes. Now you can reduce uncertainty and confidently drive insight beyond human bias in one simple cloud solution.
Automatically receive strategic insights with SAP Analytics Cloud’s embedded machine learning technology, helping you go from insight to action in a fraction of the time. Avoid agenda-driven decision making by unveiling the true story of what is driving your business.
Answer business questions with easy, self-service business intelligence capabilities. Interactively work with your information and gather meaningful insights.
- Key Performance measurement & Analysis
- Data Visualisations & Dashboards
- Interactive & Collaborative Reporting
- Data Blending
- Mobility and Decision making platform
- Better decision-making
- Create performance benchmarks
- Spot market trends
- Improve compliance
Consolidation
Get Greater Control of Your Financial Close with Codestone’s own INSIGHTS for Planning & Consolidation. The only Consolidation solution on the market that integrates with SAP Analytics Cloud for full Consolidation functionality.
Perform complex consolidations, create regulatory reports and store all data to be faster, more accurate and compliant. Collect, audit and store all financial data and gain deeper insights into your financial performance with feature-rich management reporting. Gain visibility into the progress of tasks by user and region.
- Reduce time to close
- Break down silos
- Inter-company matching / reconciliation
- Inter-company eliminations
- Management consolidation and reporting
- Legal / statutory consolidation
- Data mapping / submission
Forecasting
Strengthen your business’s future performance with forecasting and future outcomes.
- Rolling forecasts
- Integrated financial statement modeling
- P&L
- Balance sheet
- Cash flow
- Scenario modelling
Financial Reporting and Analytics
Better insights lead to better outcomes. Improve financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting with one trusted source of information.
- Ad hoc reporting
- Variance analysis
- Driver analysis (industry, growth, capacity, etc.)
- Root cause analysis
Extended Planning and Analysis
SAP Analytics Cloud is not a FP&A tool. It breaks down silos and extends planning beyond the realms of finance It is a highly versatile and flexible dashboarding and reporting tool. With SAP Analytics Cloud, planning is for everyone, with use cases in:
- Finance
- Operational
- Sales
- Supply Chain, including demand, inventory, supply,
- Capital Expenditure
- HR
- Revenue Planning
- Cost Planning
- Financial Statement (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow)
- Liquidity Management
SAP Datasphere
SAP Datasphere enhances Data Warehouse Cloud with powerful data services:
- Establishes a unified data experience on SAP Business Technology Platform.
- Integrates various data sources for comprehensive understanding and decision-making.
- Supports an open data ecosystem with multiple vendor and external data product integrations.
Reporting your team can run
without raising a ticket
Codestone helps you design dashboards around the questions your people ask most, so getting answers feels quick and natural. Often, that speed comes down to who can create the report. When a question needs a small variation on an existing report, it usually has to wait for the one or two people who can build it, however simple the change.
SAP Analytics Cloud makes that much easier with self service reporting, while keeping your analysts at the heart of it. Business users can filter, slice and drill into their own dashboards for everyday questions, and your analysts can focus their time on the deeper work where their expertise makes the biggest difference. The result is questions answered right there in the meeting, and a team that feels confident exploring the numbers for themselves.
Codestone helps you design dashboards around the questions your people ask most, so getting answers feels quick and natural. Often, that speed comes down to who can create the report. When a question needs a small variation on an existing report, it usually has to wait for the one or two people who can build it, however simple the change.
SAP Analytics Cloud makes that much easier with self service reporting, while keeping your analysts at the heart of it. Business users can filter, slice and drill into their own dashboards for everyday questions, and your analysts can focus their time on the deeper work where their expertise makes the biggest difference. The result is questions answered right there in the meeting, and a team that feels confident exploring the numbers for themselves.
Planning connected
to the actuals
Planning sits on the same platform as the reporting, which closes the gap that makes variance analysis painful. Budgets, rolling forecasts and scenario models draw on the same numbers your reports use, so there is only one version of the actual to compare the plan against.
It handles annual budgeting, sales and revenue planning, headcount, capital expenditure and cash flow, and it will do management consolidation. Heavy statutory consolidation across a complex group, with inter-company eliminations, minority interest and a full disclosure process, is a different job, and it belongs on a dedicated platform.
Planning sits on the same platform as the reporting, which closes the gap that makes variance analysis painful. Budgets, rolling forecasts and scenario models draw on the same numbers your reports use, so there is only one version of the actual to compare the plan against.
It handles annual budgeting, sales and revenue planning, headcount, capital expenditure and cash flow, and it will do management consolidation. Heavy statutory consolidation across a complex group, with inter-company eliminations, minority interest and a full disclosure process, is a different job, and it belongs on a dedicated platform.
What the predictive tools can and cannot do
The platform includes forecasting and pattern detection that will extend a trend, flag an outlier and produce a statistical forecast alongside the one your team built. It is genuinely useful for spotting the thing nobody thought to look for. It still needs someone who knows your business to judge what it finds, and it is better to say that now than to have a model quietly disagree with your sales director for two quarters.
How it connects to what you already run
SAP Analytics Cloud connects live to SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business One, SAP Business Warehouse and SAP Datasphere, and it will also read from non-SAP sources, including SQL databases, flat files and other cloud applications. Most organisations Codestone works with have a mixed picture and no realistic prospect of tidying it before they need the reporting, which is a perfectly normal place to start.
SAP S/4HANA · SAP Business One
A live connection is only as fast as the system underneath it, so if your source is already struggling the reporting will inherit that, and we check it before promising anything. A platform also cannot fix a data model that disagrees with itself. Where two systems define a customer or a cost centre differently, people have to settle that before any tool can reconcile it.
What changes for finance
The visible change is speed: the monthly pack assembles itself, and the board gets to ask a follow-up question and have it answered in the room. The more useful change is quieter. When the reporting is trusted, finance stops spending its credibility defending the numbers and starts spending it on what the numbers mean.
From the finance side
At Mainetti, Julie Forsythe describes the practical effect as being that “our CFO and CEO can view our Monthly Management Report and drill down with a click of a button”, which is the practical test. The reporting stops being something finance produces and becomes something leadership uses.
Working with Codestone on SAP Analytics Cloud
Codestone often starts with a single report your team would like to feel more confident in. By working back from one specific number, we can quickly see what’s behind it, and more often than not it comes down to how that figure is defined.
From there, we build the connection, agree clear definitions together and deliver a first set of reports your team can easily extend themselves. Training is built into every project, so your people feel comfortable using self service from the start and it keeps delivering value long after go live.
What really makes the difference is knowing where the numbers live inside SAP. Many analytics questions come down to which table, posting period or company code a figure should come from, and because Codestone implements and can support the SAP systems your data comes from, we can answer those questions quickly and get you to reports everyone can rely on.
After go-live
Once it is live, Codestone looks after the platform and the connections behind it, keep on top of SAP’s regular releases so new features do not break existing reports and help your team extend the model as new questions come up. Regular reviews look at which reports are used and which are not, because an unused dashboard usually means a question has changed.
What does SAP Analytics Cloud cost?
SAP licenses SAP Analytics Cloud on a subscription basis per user based on individual needs. The implementation depends on how many sources feed it and whether planning is in scope from the start. A first reporting build on one SAP system is a modest piece of work, and Codestone gives you a scoped figure once we have seen what you are working with.
Common questions
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Is SAP Analytics Cloud just dashboards?
No. Reporting and dashboards are the visible part, but planning, forecasting and predictive analysis run on the same platform and the same data, which is the main reason to choose it over a pure visualisation tool.
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How does it compare with Power BI?
They overlap on reporting and differ on planning. Power BI is excellent at visualisation across many sources and is often already in the organisation. SAP Analytics Cloud is stronger where planning and reporting need to sit on the same SAP data, and it reads SAP’s semantic model natively. We implement both, and the answer usually depends on where your data lives.
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Do we need a data warehouse first?
Not necessarily, and assuming you do delays a lot of projects. A live connection to S/4HANA or Business One is often enough to get real value. A warehouse or SAP Datasphere earns its place when you combine several sources, keep history the source system discards or support many concurrent users.
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Will it work with our non-SAP systems?
Yes, alongside SAP, through the same connections. The practical question is whether both sides use the same definitions, which is the part worth scoping properly.
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How long before we see something useful?
A first working dashboard on live data usually takes weeks, and we aim for something real early so you judge the platform on your own numbers. Rolling it out across several functions takes longer and usually works best in stages.
Our CFO and CEO can view our Monthly Management Report and drill down with a click of a button and achieved what we’ve achieved so far, with little to no disruption to the group.
They’ve been really patient and have supported us throughout. Working with them was easy – they knew what they were doing, what we needed, and even took the time to answer questions outside the scope of the project.
Our recent engagement has been quick, efficient, and consistent. They understand our business and our consolidation needs. They've made things easy, and a great experience.
