With the ability to simplify your infrastructure, Embedded Analytics is a key innovation at the very core of S/4HANA.
What is Embedded Analytics?
SAP S/4HANA’s Embedded Analytics is an archive of tools and concepts that allow the use of analytics in your reporting. It is my belief that the future lies in these tools which design effective reports. With the help of real-time operational reporting in your transactional system, Embedded Analytics opens up whole new horizons when it comes to reporting. In contrast to traditional reporting landscapes involving ERP and data warehouse systems, in embedded analytics, there is no need for ETL (Data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading) and batch processing.
Why should I use SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics?
One of the main challenges faced in data analytics today is providing the right information to the right person in a systematic and timely manner. SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics offers some clear advantages over the age-old classic reporting system. Delivering relevant data at the right time drives business decisions. Therefore, data needs to be analyzed in real-time. Not just this, there are numerous benefits of embedded analytics.
- Firstly, allowing organizations to embed real-time business analytics within the context of a business process.
- It does away with unnecessary tables, and redundant data, and delivers a single source of truth.
- Providing insight that leads to the ability to take necessary actions right away without having to launch multiple applications or transactions.
- Allowing power users to create their own queries and KPI tiles.
- It enables the re-use of data models in all analytical applications.
- Finally, it provides a consistent look and feels across the entire system. It also provides consistency across all devices, desktop, or mobile.
SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics
SAP S/4HANA uses SAP ABAP Core Data Services (CDS) to create Virtual Data Models (VDM) or represent operational data. In the image below, you can see a list of tools that are available to us to create the VDMs.
Even in the standard version, there are many SAP views available usable for reporting.
At the backend, SAP S/4 HANA uses CDS views as the virtual data model for embedded analytics. You can create ABAP CDS views based on the master data tables of SAP S/4HANA.
The ABAP CDS views are developed, maintained, and enhanced in the ABAP layer of the SAP S/4HANA system, which automatically creates SQL runtime views in SAP HANA. Therefore, these go on to comp the readout and transformation of the data within the SAP HANA database layer.
In conclusion, there are many “operational reports” in SAP BW/Data warehouse which S/4 Embedded Analytics replace. However, it depends on each customer’s specific business needs. S/4 Embedded Analytics offers new capabilities and business values to the user community which traditional reporting tools do not offer.
It is, therefore, important to think about which report should be sourced from S/4HANA and which should be sourced from a data warehouse system. A few vital points to consider would be;
- Whether the report requires data from multiple source systems.
- How much data you need to be download.
- Whether you need analytics on old data as well.
- Whether you require snapshots of old data as well.
Enabling all the VDM provided by SAP can also lead to performance issues. Therefore, consider the volume of data required and the data retention policies of the organization.
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