Well Managed BI

Western Kentucky University (WKU) uses SAP BusinessObjects as their reporting solution. They are currently running BI 4.2, but will upgrade shortly to BI 4.3. They were challenged by repetitive administrative tasks and change management as manual administration was time-consuming, labor-intensive and prone to human error.

A recent TDWI Executive Q&A on the State of Cloud Analytics notes the rising popularity of Cloud-based Analytics. It cites survey data that demonstrates customers see Cloud-based Analytics as more cost effective, providing faster time to value, easier to use, more functional, and having a democratizing effect on Analytics. However, there are two major limiting factors on the successful deployment of Cloud-based Analytics platforms.

APOS Live Data Gateway helps analysts across the spectrum of business and not-for-profit organizations who are using SAP Analytics Cloud to fulfill their Analytics missions by enabling the inclusion of data from all enterprise data assets in their Analytics. Enterprise data resides in numerous data assets, and APOS Live Data Gateway makes that data available where it resides. Data is live, and remains current, governed and secure.

SAP’s BTP Adoption Program Team recently hosted a presentation and panel on expanding live data connectivity for SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Datasphere. APOS Chief Operating Officer and APOS Solution Consulting Manager Alan Golding delivered the presentation on Expanded Live Connectivity for SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Datasphere with APOS Live Data Gateway.

SAP’s Eric Fenollosa recently posted a summary of the April 2023 update to the SAP Analytics Business Intelligence Statement of Direction on the SAP Community blog with a link to Laura Vega’s SAP Community blog post, UNV is dead, long live UNX. Laura mentions and links to APOS Migrator for Web Intelligence.

A major auto manufacturing company in India adopted SAP Analytics Cloud as their analytics platform to ensure their management team had the tools to fulfill the company’s objectives and vision. They use SAP Analytics Cloud to communicate KPIs to the management team, but had experienced challenges in communicating those KPIs in a timely and effective manner.

SAP Analytics Cloud is the go-forward BI and Analytics solution for SAP customers. SAP has invested heavily into this cloud-based Analytics platform, combining Business Intelligence (BI), Planning, and Predictive Analytics reporting, with AI and ML capabilities, all in one platform.

A TDWI Best Practices Report on Monetizing Enterprise Data and Analytics outlines the importance of data democratization. APOS Live Data Gateway enables data democratization, releasing the value of your data while safeguarding data access and governance through virtualized data connectivity.

A US Division 1 university planned to upgrade their SAP BusinessObjects CMS data platform to Oracle 19c, but quickly discovered their UNV universes were not supported in later Oracle versions. With 80 UNV universes and 50,000 Web Intelligence reports, manual conversion would place a great strain on resources and substantially delay their Oracle upgrade. They needed to find a means of automating the conversion process.

If you haven’t already begun the process of converting to UNX, you should start soon, because many organizations with large numbers of reports to repoint are finding they need to plan a timely and ordered transition over an extended period of time to make best use of their resources.

One of the greatest challenges facing Analytics teams is establishing live connectivity to all of the enterprise data they need for a complete picture of their organization’s financial, operational, sales and marketing information. APOS Live Data Gateway helps organizations quickly realize value in their Analytics.

Organizations need to communicate their SAP Analytics Cloud insights to stakeholders both within and outside of the organization. APOS Publisher for Cloud lets APOS customers get personalized Analytics to the right people, at the right time, and in the right format.

An Asia-based producer of market pulp, paper, and fibre-based packaging needed advanced publishing capabilities to schedule, generate and distribute personalized, user-specific reports in SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). APOS Publisher for Cloud was proposed by a trusted APOS consulting and implementation partner. The partner undertook proof of concept with the customer with help from APOS Technical Support.

A Europe-based multinational lighting corporation who manufactures innovative electric lighting solutions needed a report broadcasting solution to burst SAP Analytics stories to executive and sales teams. These teams, made up of more than 2,000 SAP Analytics Cloud users across multiple, globally disparate data centers, required recipient-specific sales statistics dashboards to be delivered to team members on a daily basis.

Converting UNV universes to UNX and repointing Web Intelligence is a large IT project for organizations with 10s and 100s of throusands of reports. Automating UNX adoption gives such organizations the opportunity to complete a timely and ordered transition to UNX while managing their content and resources and avoiding disruptions.

Data security continues to be the highest priority for organizations, but tighter security is generally accompanied by higher administration costs for IT and BI teams. A major US university recently revised its security policies to increase the frequency with which database passwords must be changed. For the BI team, this change meant that they needed to make changes to thousands of SAP BusinessObjects reports, instances and schedules frequently, creating an untenable manual process that ate into its available resources.

With the new APOS Publisher for Cloud Enterprise Edition, multiple departments and groups can now collaborate and share data on a centralized and secure enterprise system and achieve the same personalized, tailored and targeted SAP Analytics Cloud broadcasting capabilities.

BTP CTO Iver van der Zand’s recent TechTalk, posted to the SAP Community blog, provides a very clear and concise vision of the path forward for the SAP Community and for organizations using SAP Analytics in particular. BTP draws together the resources and capabilities such organizations need to formulate a comprehensive Analytics strategy and roadmap for digital transformation.