Tag Archives: sap

SAP BW/4HANA – The Value of Agility

Thank you Neil McGovern, SAP Senior Director of Marketing for this article.

On August 31st, 2016 we released SAP BW/4HANA. A great deal of ink and pixels has been spilled outlining its capabilities, but I’d like to look at one of the key reasons we built this new product.
As we stated in our earlier post the Forrester research we sponsored showed a correlation between business agility and revenue growth.
In SAP BW/4HANA the option to deploy on SAP HEC and Amazon AWS (plus others to follow) in addition to on-premise, has given customers the ability to start a new BW/4HANA instance in under an hour.
BW/4HANA users also will have the advantage of enhanced modeling coupled with a dramatically simplified set of data warehousing objects and simplified governance that will enable agile data warehousing development, delivering better real-time business insights faster, and at less cost, than before. Business applications can either leverage “pre-built” data warehousing or “SQL-based” development environments that delivers faster go-to-market and lets applications work with other SQL-based solutions.
Agility is key for BW/4HANA. We have improved agility in three ways:
SIMPLICITY
• The number of data objects is reduced –eliminates data redundancies, increases consistency, and results in a smaller footprint
MODERN INTERFACE
• Administration efforts to maintain data objects and error-prone data flows are also reduced
• Customers can build their own HANA models on top of the BW/4 HANA models
• User interface will improve for administrators, as next generation HANA Studio and Browser front ends will be used instead of SAP GUI front ends
OPENNESS
• Customers see great benefit in the possibility to expose BW/4 HANA models as native HANA views
• Customers will be able to use HANA in “BW” mode and in native “SQL” mode or a combination of the two
One of our first BW/4HANA customers is Fairfax Media. Fairfax are an experienced BW customer who had business challenges that fit BW/4HANA new capabilities. With BW/4HANA the project took half the time anticipated, three months instead of six. The flexibility and simplicity of the new object set and development environment, plus the ability to develop in the Cloud were key to this success. The resulting system was 10 times faster for end users and allowed cost savings to be identified in their expenses.

BW/4HANA, HANA Cloud Integration, and S/4HANA Finance are areas where Amick Brown can help your company succeed. AmickBrown.com

Learn more about BW/4HANA at sap.com/bw4hana

 

What if Beethoven and Mozart Invented Their Own Notation System

sheet_music_violinTo appreciate how semantic notation can impact your business, take a step back for a moment and imagine if every composer from Mozart to Beethoven used a different notation system. How would conductors and musicians interpret the music in a moment without standardized notation? What if engineers didn’t have a standardized notation system? Most likely they wouldn’t be able to communicate vast amounts of information clearly and quickly.

Yet in business, there is an overabundance of ways to layout out corporate reports and dashboards. And even within a single company, you will find forecast data or averages defined and displayed differently. But with pattern recognition, you can immediately understand the context of that information. This is the essence of a standard notation system, which brings clearer, data-driven insights and faster visualization turnaround.

Communicate Vast Amounts of Data-Driven Insights with Clearer, More Aligned Messages

Executives can  digest and act on visual data faster when it is always laid out the same: forecast, averages, historical and all metrics always looks the same and are in the same layout. People learn quickly to recognize patterns, and this is helpful to interpreting volumes of data. Critical to good business decision-making is the ability to portray very dense amounts of information, while maintaining clarity. This is vital when extrapolating multiple metrics for data to understand how it relates to the business.

A visualization that shows a percentage breakdown of revenue into products is, in itself, not very useful. To act and make better decisions, you need to understand how revenue has changed over time and to compare it to other product lines, the budget, profit margin, and market share. Also, executives spend less time trying to align the data into one version of the truth when all metrics are calculated and portrayed using the same standards across all business units. Having a standard notation system in your business can help you foster data-driven culture and alignment for better decision making. 

Faster and Improved Visualization of Analysis and Insights

Although content creators spend less time inventing their own system and layout, they still follow guidelines. In speaking with people who have adopted international business communications standards (IBCS), they found, for example, that the average time to create dashboard dropped three-fold. Through standard notation systems, they shortened implementation times and improved the outcome of their analytics investments.

Don’t Start from Scratch – These Are Best Practices

One of the best-developed, semantic notation systems – which was only chosen by the SAP Executive Board back in 2011 – is based on an open source project called International Business Communications Standards. Anyone can join the association and benefit from years of thought leadership and best practices developed over decades. Plus, the community is included in the evolution of these standards.

Register for the Standards Course

OpenSAP allows you to learn anywhere, anytime and on any device with free courses open to the public.

This blog orignially appeared on the  D!gitalist Magazine by SAP and SAP Business Objects Analytics blog has been republished with permission.

 

I Think We Need a GRC Tool. Where Do We Start?

 by Thomas Frenehard,                                               SAP GRC Solution Management

compassI’m not going to say that I have this question every Monday morning, but it does pop up rather more often than I would have expected. This is especially the case when risk, compliance or audit departments ask their IT counterparts to send them a list of suitable governance, risk and compliance (GRC) vendors but fail to really explain what they need.In essence, the request to their mind is pretty simple—just get me the list and rankings published by “[…] and […]” ( fill-in-the- blank spaces with your favourite analyst companies). That should do the trick.

This is usually what triggers the question above, with the IT department reaching out asking for a discussion on what is a GRC solution to ensure that they only source relevant options to present to their internal clients.

As mentioned by my colleague Jan Gardiner a few weeks ago (GRC ≠ Access Authorization Management), for us at SAP, the GRC portfolio is a combination of more than 10 solutions.

As a result, before even going further into any discussion, my answer is always the same, ”Well, what do you need to do?” I could spend hours explaining and illustrating the benefits of a full internal control solution, but if the original request comes from the audit team who is looking for a tool to help them support their risk-based auditing process, I’m not sure it’ll be of much use.

What’s the Requirement?

So first things first—define the need. Easier said than done of course, but it will be the foundation for everything. In case the requiring team doesn’t have a predefined idea of what exactly it is they need in terms of detailed requirements, you can always reach internally and see what is already available and being used (tools, spreadsheets, shared drives,).

Even if you then decide that none are the right option, this will still give you a good idea of what people are using today and for what purpose. And if you push your investigation further and interview the key users, they might even tell you what they currently lack. This is essential as it may lead to needs or pain points that are beyond the ones initially expressed.

Prepare for Today but Plan for Tomorrow

Now that you know the requirements, define where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow (or the day after). And keep in mind that a tool will never solve all your problems at once but it can bring new ones if expectations aren’t managed properly.

Using the information you collected above, work on a roadmap—what would be the first features needed today to facilitate work life, and what is,at the moment,  a “nice to have” but that you know will be important in the future.

With this in mind, start prioritizing so that the tool selected will be able to answer the immediate requirements, but also accompany the company as it evolves.

Leave Tabula Rasa to Aristotle!

Your company already has a wealth of risk registers, control libraries, audit repositories, and so on.

This is the “GRC memory” of your company and you certainly don’t want to get rid of it.

Collect as much as you can and then work with the business owners to review the data—define what should be carried forward, what is redundant and can be let go, and so forth.

And for what you decide is worth keeping, ensure that it’s complete and well documented. This way, not only will you embark on a new tool, but you will also have secured the consistency of the imported data. No need to have a Formula 1 car if you don’t have the right fuel, right?

Of course, I have over simplified the process, but for  a short blog that was my intent. But I hope this has still given you some food for thought for the next time your business owners call saying, “We need a GRC tool, what do you suggest?”

I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments either on this blog or on Twitter @TFrenehard

 

In the New Digital Economy, Everything Can Be Digitized and Tracked : Now What?

Woman Buying ClothesWelcome to a world where digital reigns supreme. Remember when the Internet was more of a ‘push’ network? Today, it underpins how most people and businesses conduct transactions – providing peer-to-peer connections where every single interaction can be tracked.

Enterprises are still not taking full advantage. With hundreds of millions of people connected, it’s possible for them to connect their suppliers with their customers and their payment systems, and reach the holy grail of seamlessly engaging in commerce, where a transaction can be tracked from purchase, to order received, to manufacturing, through to shipment— all in real time. It’s clear that end-to-end digitization delivers enormous potential, but it has yet to be fully tapped by most companies.

In the latest #askSAP Analytics Innovations Community Webcast, Reimagine Predictive Analytics for the Digital Enterprise, attendees were given an introduction to SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics, along with some key use cases. The presentation covered native in-memory predictive analytics, deploying predictive analytics on Big Data, and how to bring predictive insight to Business Intelligence (BI).

The live, interactive call was moderated by  SAP Mentor  Greg Myers and featured expert speakers Ashish Morzaria, Global GTM Director, Advanced Analytics, and Richard Mooney, Lead Product Manager for Advanced Analytics.

The speakers noted that companies used to become leaders in their industries by establishing an unbeatable brand or by having a supply chain that was more efficient than anyone else’s. While this is still relevant in the digital economy, companies now have to think about how they can turn this new digital economy to their advantage. One of the keys is turning the digital economy’s key driver —the data— to their advantage.

Companies embracing digital transformation are outperforming those who aren’t. With predictive analytics, these companies can use historical data to predict behaviors or outcomes, answer “what-if” questions, and ensure employees have what they need to make optimized decisions. They can fully leverage customer relationships with better insight, and make meaningful sense of Big Data.

One big question delved into during the call: How can companies personalize each interaction across all channels and turn each one into an advantage? The answer: By getting a complete digital picture of their customers and applying predictive analytics to sharpen their marketing focus, optimize their spend, redefine key marketing activities, and offer product recommendations tailored to customers across different channels.

Real-World Customer Stories

The call also focused on some real-world examples of customers achieving value by using and embedding predictive analytics in their decisions and operations, including Cox Cable, Monext, M-Bank, and Mobilink.

These companies have been able to improve performance across thousands of processes and decisions, and also create new products, services, and business models. They’ve squeezed more efficiencies and margins from their production assets, processes, networks, and people.

One key takeaway is the importance of using algorithms, as they provide insights that can make a business process more profitable or competitive, and spotlight new ways of doing business and new opportunities for growth.

The speakers also presented a very detailed customer case study on Harris Logic. The company is using SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics for automated analytics and rapid prototyping of their models. They execute models into SAP HANA for real-time predictions using a native, logistical regression model. This approach is allowing for the identification of key predictors that more heavily influence a behavioral health outcome.

Learn More

Lots of food for thought. See what questions people were asking during the webcast and get all of the answers here. Check out the complete presentation, and continue to post your questions and watch for dates for our upcoming webcast in the series via Twitter using #askSAP.

AmickBrown.com

SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA – Let’s Start at the Beginning

by Ashith Bolar, Director AmBr Labs, Amick Brown

Every week at Amick Brown, we are questioned about HANA There is a lot of confusion in the market with the multiple options. As well, there are many questions about timing and business application. You have asked, so we will start a series of HANA articles to address your questions.

grow blue suit

SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, shortened to SAP S/4HANA,  is a big strategic play from SAP. Here is why you need to take heed.

The new SAP S/4HANA is supposed to replace the SAP Business Suite (formerly R/3) over the next few years. This announcement and the launch of the software lay a roadmap for SAP in the coming years.

What led to this launch?

SAP is a leader in ERP worldwide. However, in the recent past, a new trend is taking over in the business world. Cloud-based software services also known as Software-as-a-Service. SAP has SaaS components to it, but its main business model has been selling software the old way: software installed at the customers’ premise.

Other cloud companies  have been slowly chipping away at SAP’s market share. And this is SAP’s answer.

Name

The R in R/3 stood for real-time. The S in the S/4 stands for Simple. This is the big idea. SAP is planning on simplifying the ERP system with this release.

Database

While SAP R/3 Business Suite ran on any database, S/4 runs exclusively on HANA. SAP has spent considerable financial resources and effort on building up the in-memory database over the past few years. SAP HANA has tremendous performance advantages compared to the older disk-based database solutions. This large-scale change has enabled SAP to dramatically simplify both the data-model as well as the user-experience.

One significant aspect of HANA is that it is an in-memory appliance. This means data-access times (disk read/writes) are not an issue anymore, allowing developers to focus more on business logic than performance. This lends itself to the other motivation for S/4 – simplicity.

The Cloud

SAP S/4HANA is mostly a movement of SAP’s premier software from customer premise to the cloud. However, on-premise solutions will still be available. SAP offers 3 options:

  1. Public Cloud – Completely managed by SAP. Multi-tenancy shared by all public cloud customers
  2. Private Cloud – Partially managed by SAP. Exclusive database per customer.
  3. On-Premise – Software installed on client’s hardware. Client pays for user-licenses.

Software

SAP S/4HANA will allow customization to S/4HANA on the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). This means ABAP developers will get to continue to use their skills. If you don’t know OO, it is a good time to learn it.

UI

Let’s admit it, SAP R/3 has not been known for its stellar user-experience. UI on SAP R/3 has been clunky, rigid and unwelcoming. But the S/4HANA user-interface will be based on SAP’s Fiori UX platform. SAP Fiori, launched earlier in 2014, gives the software a new look-and-feel. The fact it does not have licensing cost should make it attractive to customers with an existing SAP installation.

Conclusion

Co-founder, Hasso Plattner said “If this doesn’t work, we’re dead. Flat-out dead.” This may be just Hasso Plattner being the passionate visionary that he is. But this indeed is a huge launch from SAP, one whose initial roll out is expected to be 3-5 years, and customer transitions lasting more 10 years.

The story on S/4 HANA continues here.  Watch this space and Follow Amick Brown on LinkedIn

Reimagine Predictive Analytics for the Digital Enterprise

future_predictive_analytics_SAPPHIRENOW

As part of a broad announcement made at SAPPHIRE NOW 2016, SAP announced a range of new features and capabilities in its analytics solutions portfolio. Because predictive capabilities play an important role in the portfolio, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share the details of our innovations in both SAP BusinessObjects Cloud and SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics.

Innovations in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud

Predictive analytics capabilities have been added to the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud offering. Business users can use an intuitive graphical user interface to investigate business scenarios by leveraging powerful built-in algorithmic models. For example, users can perform financial projections with time series forecasts, automatically identify key influencers of operational performance, and determine factors impacting employee performance with guided machine discovery.

Learn more about our predictive capabilities in SAP BusinessObjects Cloud.

Innovations in SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics features that aim to help analysts easily deliver predictive insights across an enterprise’s business processes and applications are planned for availability in the near term.

Planned innovations include:

  • Automated predictive analysis of Big Data with native Spark modeling in Hadoop environments
  • Enhancements for SAP HANA including in-database social network analysis and embedding expert model chains
  • A new simplified user interface for the predictive factory and automated generation of segmented forecast models
  • Integration of third-party tools and external processes into predictive factory workflows
  • The ability to create and manage customized models that detect complex fraud patterns for the SAP Fraud Management analytic application

Learn more about what SAP Predictive Analytics has in store.

Upcoming Release of SAP Predictive Analytics

Watch the video about our upcoming release of SAP Predictive Analytics for more information.

Thank you to Pierre Leroux, Director, Predictive Analytics Product Marketing, SAP for writing this informative article.

AmickBrown.com

 

4 Best Practices to make your Storyboards more Dynamic and Appealing

By Iver van de Zand  – Business Intelligence & Analytics – SAP – Visualization – DataViz – Evangelist – Author of “Passionate On Analytics”

Your end users will love it when you’d deliver your story- and dashboards in a more appealing and dynamic way. In these Let Me Guide series I discuss 4 easy to use best practices that will help you doing so:

  1. Using backgrounds

  2. Using Navigation

  3. dynamic Vector Diagram pictures: SVG

  4. Dynamic Text

Using Background

Backgrounds can better the looks and experience of story- and dashboards. Use the opacity to ensure the attention is not too much distracted from the actuals graphs and charts. I tends to create my backgrounds myself using PowerPoint: create a slide with a layout you like allocating space for KPI metrics and visualizations. Save the slide as JPG which you can import as background into SAP Lumira.

Using Navigation 

If you have story- or dashboards with multiple pages, my experience is that custom navigation buttons help you users finding what they should read. I use custom navigation all the time on my storyboard’s landing pages for example. Here is how you do it:

  •  Find a shape or picture that you want to use as clickable button and save it as xx.jpg

  • Import xx.jpg as picture in Lumira and drop it on your storyboard where you want it

  • Drag and drop a rectangle shape exactly over you newly created button and set its lines and fill-color both to “none”

  • Click you “invisible” shape and add the URL or page number to it

  • Save and preview

Example landing page B

example of navigation buttons

Example landing page A

Example landing page A

Example of a core layout of a landing page for your storyboard. The color-coded tiles can be used as navigation buttons. The generic tiles act to show key metrics info. Save the core lay-out as JPG and use this JPG as core background in your storyboard. Now add an object over the color coded sections, make it invisible and add a page-link to the appropriate page in your story.

SVG files

Especially infographics gain on weight and meaningfulness if you use dynamic pictures as part of your charts and graphs. Bar- and line charts in SAP Lumira have the possibility to change its regular column and markers into a dynamic pictogram. You can use the embedded pictograms but also add your own. The pictograms need to be in the SVG dynamic vector format. Search for pictures on Google with the “ filetype:SVG” string to find SVG’s. Save and import them to Lumira and change the graphs properties. The results are impressive. It is easy to create your own SVG files: I use PowerPoint to create my own pictures and save them to JPG. Using conversion tools easily creates an SVG that you can use as dynamic chart/graph picture in your storyboards.

Dynamic Text

Dynamic Text is a powerful way to improve context sensitive messaging in your story- and dashboards. The dynamic text is based on a dataset attributes and thus changes when data is refreshed are filtered. Since SAP Lumira handles the dynamic text as any other attribute, you can also apply formulas against the text.

The Time to Change is Now

clock_calendar_moneyThe world is speeding ahead at a significant pace towards a major revolution—the data-driven economy.  Several data-driven start-ups in the last decade have become large corporations (Google, Facebook, Twitter), with billions of people reached and influenced by their innovations. Here is a list of the hottest start-ups that are looking to mature to the big league.

As the momentum is picking up, major organizations from different industry verticals are in a quest to exploit the opportunities that have arisen from the humongous amount of data that their business generates, directly and indirectly. Philip Evans, Senior Partner, Boston Consulting Group, discussed in his TED talk what businesses would look like in the future, and the impact that Big Data will have on business strategies.

Whether businesses want to use data to make the world a better place, to understand the wishes of customers before they’re expressed, to be more proactive than reactive in decision making based on predictive technologies, or something else, there are several challenges that we must all face.

These challenges include the following.

  1. Data volumes are ever-increasing. Most of the data is unstructured (either textual, videos, graphs and so on) rather than transactional and structured.
  2. The decision cycles are becoming shorter. We expect millisecond response times from the systems we interact with. And with mission-critical applications, the response time could be even shorter.
  3. Thousands of predictive models are required to get coverage of all the predictive scenarios that an application can create.
  4. Traditional methods of modelling are very time-consuming. The quest to find a perfect model drains valuable time and money before it can be put to business use.
  5. The knowledge workers who understand data science, and who could mine useful actionable nuggets from the data, are rare. The demand for such skilled workers is ever-increasing and their lack of availability is causing a massive skills gap.

With Challenges Comes Opportunities

However, with challenges come opportunities.

Consider the Industrial Revolution. As we know, at that point in history the move was to automate processes that were repetitive or required more manual effort, and find ways to free valuable resources—the brain and imagination—that we use to focus on even larger problems. The result is the modern world we now live in.

Now the data revolution is demanding a new change. That is, the way in which we work with data. We must find ways and means to automate most of the repetitive workflows and modelling processes that are applicable industry-wide. This way, we can free the very valuable time of the data scientist to focus on tough problems that cannot be solved without human intervention.

With several thousand models that enable a data-driven company to run, it’s also important to have capabilities that enable the company to monitor the performance of these models in real time. This means decommissioning the models that exhibit significant deviation in performance, as compared to when they were deployed on production systems.

This paves the way for the need of a Massive Predictive Factory, a single source of truth and heart-beat monitor for the entire organization.

For more on Predictive Analytics, Follow Amick Brown

Predictive Analytics and the Segment of One

by Richard Mooney,                                           Product Manager, Advanced Analytics, SAP

 

Woman Buying Clothes --- Image by © Tim Pannell/CorbisOne of the areas that SAP is investing heavily in is the idea of providing ‘extreme customer experience’ to the ‘Segment of One.’  What does this mean for analytics? Traditionally, large enterprises split customers into multiple segments based on customer attributes that were then used to identify and classify customers.  These segments included their location, their current and potential spend, and which products and options they chose when they became a customer.

Marketers use these segments to determine which products they would market to which customers. Likewise, customer support applies different levels of service to each customer segment, and operations measures the profitability of each segment separately.

This is both highly frustrating to customers and an incredibly inefficient use of resources.

  • Every customer is different. They feel frustrated when their individual needs aren’t met, and their expectations about how they’re treated as customers are rising.
  • A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t take into account the emerging customer acquisition and support channels that provide the potential to reduce the cost of service and market much more effectively. This includes mobiles applications, social networks, and the internet of things.
  • Because the cost of customer communication is plummeting, customers are inundated with content. They’re choosing to delete, unfollow and unsubscribe from content that doesn’t speak to them.

These same trends are opportunities. Companies are collecting far more information than ever before and the technology exists to leverage this at scale.  They no longer need to treat customers as being pure segments.  They can market to them personally, understand their likes and preferences, and give them services, all of which turns them into fans and advocates.

So How Do We Use Data to Connect to the Segment of One?

  • Make the Segment of One a corporate mandate. Communicate and service each customer as if it were a personal connection.
  • Rethink how your digital front office assets (including digital marketing, customer service and online) interact with customers to support this mandate.
  • Build a team of data scientists and data analysts to move from guesswork to data-driven decision making.
  • Build your customer communication around their analysis and deploy their work into every front office application. Measure and monitor the return on investment (ROI) from each initiative.

Done properly, this will result in happier customers and higher net promoter scores.   It also means that the data companies are collecting results in visible ROI, which improves their bottom line.

We would love to hear your thoughts on how the Segment of One will drive your data strategy.  Contact us or comment here to let us know.

 

Brainteaser: Storyboard or Dashboard…Self-Service or Managed…you choose

By Iver Van de Zand, SAP

If there is one term that always is food for discussion when I talk to customers, it is definitely “dashboard”. What exactly is a dashboard, how close is it to a storyboard, are dashboard only on summarized data and when to use a dashboard versus a storyboard. Tons of questions that already start in a bad shape because people have other perceptions of what a dashboard really is. And let’s be honest; take a canvas, put a few pies on it and a bar-chart, and people will already mention it as a dashboard. Let’s see whether we can fine-tune this discussion a bit.

A Dashboard

A business intelligence dashboard is a data visualization technique that displays the current status and/or historical trends of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for an enterprise. Dashboards consolidate and arrange numbers, metrics and sometimes performance scorecards on a single screen. They may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted for a single point of view or department. The essential features of a BI dashboard product include a customizable interface and the ability to pull real-time data from multiple sources. The latter is important since lots of people think dashboards are only on summarized data which is absolutely not the case; dashboards consolidate data which may be of the lowest grain available! Key properties of a dashboard are:

  1. Simple and communicates easily and straight

  2. Minimum distractions, since these could cause confusion

  3. Supports organized business with meaning, insights and useful data or information

  4. Applies human visual perception to visual presentation of information: colors play a significant role here

  5. Limited interactivity: filtering, sorting, what-if scenarios, drill down capabilities and sometimes some self-service features

  6. They are often “managed” in a sense that the dashboards are centrally developed by ICT, key users or a competence center, and they are consumed by the end-users

  7. Offer connectivity capabilities to other BI components for providing more detail. Often these are reports with are connected via query-parsing to the dashboards

A Storyboard

Is there a big difference between a storyboard and a dashboard? Mwah, not too much: they both focus on communicating key – consolidated – information in a highly visualized and way which ultimately leaves little room for misinterpretation. For both the same key words apply: simple, visual, minimum distraction.

The main difference between a dashboard and a storyboard is that the latter is fully interactive for the end user. The interactivity of the storyboard is reflected through capabilities for the end user to:

  • Sort

  • Filter data: include and exclude data

  • Change chart or graph types on the fly

  • Add new visualizations on the fly; store and share them

  • Drill down

  • Add or adjust calculated measures and dimensions

  • Add new data via wrangling, blending or joining

  • Adjust the full layout of the board

  • Create custom hierarchies or custom groupings

  • Allow for basic data quality improvements (rename, concatenate, upper and lower case etc)

Another big difference between dashboards and storyboards is that storyboards are self-service enabled boards meaning the end user creates them him/herself. Opposite to dashboards that are typically “managed” and as such are created centrally by ICT, key users or a BICC, and are consumed by the end user.

A Dashboard versus a Storyboard

So your question, dear reader, is “what is the day-to-day difference and what to you use when”? Well the answer is in the naming of both boards:

The purpose of a storyboard is to TELL A STORY: the user selects a certain scope of data (which might be blended upon various sources) and builds up a story around that data that provides insights in it from various perspectives. All in a governed way of course. The story is built upon various visualizations that are grouped together on the canvas of the storyboard. These visualizations can be interdependent – filtering on one affects the others – or not. The canvas is further enriched with comments, text, links or dynamic pictures … all with the purpose to complete the story.

Storyboarding has dramatically changed day-to-day business: the statement “your meeting will never be the same” applies definitely. Your meetings are now being prepared by creating a storyboard; meetings are held using storyboards to discuss on topics and make funded decisions, simulations on alternative decisions are done during the meetings using the storyboards and final conclusions can be shared via the storyboards. Governed, funded, based on real-insights!

A dashboard has a pattern of analyzing that is defined upfront. It is about KPI’s or trends of a certain domain, and you as a user consume that information. You can filter, sort or even drill down in the data, but you cannot change the core topic of data. If the KPI’s are on purchasing information, it is on purchasing information and stays like it. You neither can add data to compare it.

In a number of situations one does not want the end user to “interact” with the information since it is corporate fixed data that is shared on a frequent and consistent time. Enterprises want that information to be shared for insights in a consistent, regular and recognizable way. Users will recognize the dashboard, consume the information and – hopefully – act upon it. Think for example about weekly or monthly performance dashboards, or HR dashboards that provide insights in attrition on recurring moments in time.

Dashboards and Storyboards: the “SAP way”

The nuances made above on dashboards and storyboards are being reflected in SAP’s Business Intelligence Suite. Its component Design Studio is a definite managed dashboarding tool. Extremely capable of visualizing insights in a simple and highly attractive way while in the meantime able to have online connections to in-memory data sources, SAP BW or semantic layers. Storyboarding is offered via the on-premise SAP Lumira or via Cloud through the Cloud for Analyticscomponent.

If you have difficulties deciding what to offer to your end users, the BI Componentselection tool I made easily helps you understanding whether your users require dashboards or/and storyboards. You might want to try it.

Financial storyboard

Financial storyboard

Self-service storyboard created in around 45 minutes using SAP Lumira. On this page the heat-map section that allows for white spot analyses. Data can be exported at any time. User has numerous capabilities to add data, visualizations and additional pages

Retailing Dashboard

Financial storyboard

Financial storyboard

Self-service storyboard created in around 45 minutes using SAP Lumira. User has numerous capabilities to add data, visualizations and additional pages