Discover, Decide and Differentiate: Creating Direct Access in SAP - Pyramid Analytics

SAP is one of the world’s leading producers of software for the management of business processes, developing solutions that facilitate effective data processing and information flow across organizations. Many organizations are heavily invested in SAP infrastructure, which is both costly and integral to their operations.

However, there are gaps in SAP’s analytics capabilities. Organizations often view SAP as a premium product, and implementing an analytics tool that doesn’t leverage all its features is not ideal. Without a robust analytics solution, data analysis and intelligence remain weak points, leading to wasted time and effort.

How do you analyze your SAP data and use it for deeper insights?

Typically, business users rely on IT departments to extract data from SAP and reload it into BI and analytics systems, hoping to gain insights for better business results. Ideally, users would be able to query SAP data directly, leaving the data in place.

Current market tools present challenges when embedding visuals, reports, and dashboards. For example, using Tableau or Microsoft Power BI can lead to several issues:

• ​IT must perform significant custom work for embedding capabilities
• ​Organizations face substantial financial investments to enable self-service for all users
• ​Direct query capabilities produce limited visualizations
• ​These tools often have slow query speeds
• ​Forced cloud migrations can result in loss of existing infrastructure investments

Kumar Singh, Research Director at SAPinsider, recommends that analytics products be “fluid” and accessible to users with varying skill levels. He emphasizes the importance of seamless integration with other critical business applications, especially in the SAP technology landscape.

How one company made SAP data work for them

A large multinational retailer, working with multiple data sources including SAP BW/4HANA, wanted to merge SAP data with other sources such as SQL, Oracle, and Exasol. The company needed a unified platform to bring all data together.

Executives sought to replace their proprietary system, which managed point-of-sale (POS) information from 3,200 stores, with a solution that moved data into BW/4HANA. They implemented SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to generate dashboards. However, the financial lead still had to perform extensive manual work, taking several days to get a single view of disparate financial systems.

After learning about Pyramid Analytics, the financial lead adopted it for all financial data. Tasks that previously took nearly a week were reduced to just a couple of hours. The company could now combine financial and non-financial data into a single dashboard without duplicating data into BW/4HANA. Pyramid’s platform provided improved functionality, user controls, and support for ragged hierarchies, enabling tailored financial reporting for each trading company.

With Pyramid, the company achieved direct reads of views refreshed every ten minutes from over 3,200 locations with BW/4HANA. They plan to implement Pyramid Analytics in more projects. Data from BW is pushed to their data warehouse, where it can be consumed directly or combined with data from SQL Server. This approach is especially powerful for finance, as it allows combining financial data with other sources and eliminates redevelopment by reusing existing BW views.

Additional benefits of using Pyramid include native connectivity, no need for separate licenses, and an easy implementation process. The company improved functionality and user controls, enabling a shift from quarterly to monthly forecasting. They now use a mature, end-to-end self-service environment with no technological gaps.

This scenario was made possible by the Pyramid Analytics Decision Intelligence Platform. With Pyramid, organizations can enhance their SAP infrastructure and extract more value. Pyramid is SAP Certified for SAP HANA, BW/4HANA, and Netweaver, is a Silver SAP Partner, and is available on the SAP Store.

Pyramid delivers multi-source direct data access with a fast direct query engine, reducing cloud operational costs by performing queries and calculations directly at the source. As illustrated, organizations save time and money with Pyramid.

To learn more about this software and how it works with SAP, check out the SAPinsider report "Creating Value Through Decision Intelligence in SAP Landscape" or SAPinsider’s "The Future of Business Intelligence Benchmark Report." For further information or a demonstration, contact Pyramid Analytics.