Webinar: Why move from SAP Business Objects to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC)

This webinar would walk you through the exact reasons why you should choose to move from SAP BI to SAC and what are the best pathways you should consider while doing this. 

Crave InfoTech is a celebrated SAP BTP expert and has immense experience in industry-specific SAC enablement around the world. Crave InfoTech understands your business logic and intent. The webinar would show how the ‘Crave InfoTech Innovation’ program can make this SAP BI to SAC journey –beneficial, fast, clean, error-free, and seamless for you.

The right partner can mean the difference between a successful, low-cost, compliant, scalable, and future-proof (for further upgrades) enablement – and a messy and confusing upgrade that results in current and future cost-escalations. Above all, the SAC enablement should offer you the full gamut of opportunities and benefits that it entails – and this can be only done by choosing the right partner.

So make sure to mark your calendar for, what could turn out to be, a path-defining webinar for your company.

Here’s a glimpse of what to expect from the webinar. Let’s quickly look at “Why move from SAP BI to SAC in 2023?”

SAP ended mainstream SAP Business Objects BI 4.2 ended mainstream support in (Dec) 2022. Its priority support would end at the end of (Dec) 2024. Even SAP BI 4.3 would stop having maintenance support after Dec 2027. What does this mean for the many companies that are using SAP BI 4.2 or 4.3? 

Is it a problem? You might see this as a cost. But it’s a cost of tech evolution and progress.

Think about the resolution of the camera of your smartphone maybe just 5 years ago. If you compare it to now, the jump is 300-400%. The point is that the markets have evolved so fast, just keeping in line with end-customer expectations.

To remain competitive, you must ensure that your architecture always meets the highest industry benchmarks.

SAP BI 4.2 must be sunset to make way for better things. This is where SAC comes in.

SAC is an on-cloud solution that gives you the edge with continually (and easily) updated features and a one-stop solution for all business intelligence, reporting, visualizations, and analytics.

Challenge: SAP BI 4.2 and 4.3 utilize multiple tools to provide a standardized reporting and business intelligence format. SAC would have all these tools inbuilt. With SAP BI 4.3, the move to Fiori-led interfaces is already in place.

However, some users might feel that they have to unlearn the tools they have already mastered. This is a challenge only because it’s a perception. The truth is far more comforting.

Solution: As mentioned before, all good things must evolve to stay competitive and, well, ‘good’. A pop-culture reference here – when Harvey Dent says the now famous lines to Bruce Wayne, “You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain”.

Here, the added interpretation for ‘tech upgrades’ is that “If you don’t evolve and update, you will end up costing the company more in the long run and – become the villain”. Sticking to tools would prove detrimental in the future.

SAP, however, is dedicated to the easing of upgrades. They have a decade’s worth of plans already in place to ensure minimal-to-zero impact for all customers. And when factoring in experts like Crave InfoTech, the customer can simply sit back and expect perfect results from us. All logic and tool migrations are pre-planned up to an impeccable level. The upgrade and modernization process itself is very dynamic yet precise – to ensure it fits all business use cases across industries.

Companies have multiple power users that go beyond standard report modifications and write business logic into the prevalent universe – creating very detailed customized reports. They used SAP Web Intelligence (WEBI) for the logic and SAP Lumira for the designs.

With the tech and platform evolution in the world, the underlying tools used to build this logic would also transform into better versions of themselves. This means that the same logic that requires multiple hours of talented resources, can be done much faster in SAC’s simplified and automated reporting.

Challenge: If this transformation isn’t handled properly, then the many years back data wouldn’t directly compare or merge with the new data models. This may lead to inconsistent analytics and insights.

Solution: Companies must ensure that the underlying business logic is faultlessly transferred to SAC. Crave InfoTech deeply understands the business needs and challenges of such migrations.

The entire journey is meticulously structured to extract and merge old business logic with the improved SAC reporting and analytics version. The end-user would face ‘zero’ data incongruencies or compatibility issues.

It’s not all about a tech upgrade that you ‘must’ do. That’s just the bottom line. The top line, and the more relevant context, is the multiple benefits you would get with SAC over SAP Business Objects BI. It’s the highway to modernization, streamlining information, and efficiency.

SAC is built over SAP BTP, the industry-leading intelligent platform with near-zero latency and embedded machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) processes.

• SAP BTP gives SAC the perfect platform to build intuitive and smart stories, data models, and applications.
• SAP BTP also gives a gateway to SAP Build (for low-code and no-code development) and Intelligent Technologies (like Intelligent Robotic Process Automation – IRPA, Internet of Things (IoT), AI, ML, etc.)
• SAP BTP is the global standard for platform intelligence. Having SAC on SAP BTP and S/4 HANA opens up fast-scaling and future-proofing opportunities for your company.

SAC is cloud-based (including the option of a private cloud). What difference does this make?

• If you have an on-premise SAP BI, you would know that you must depend on your IT professionals to upgrade the system after any feature improvements/updates. You want the edge provided by the new feature updates, but have to accept the downtime of an on-premise update. This downtime and maintenance can grow to become significant.
• SAC is cloud-based hence all updates are pre-scheduled (at scale) within pre-communicated timeframes (weekends or off-work times). You can leave on a Friday evening with the promise of brand new and beneficial features – come back on Monday and just access the same features with zero personal effort.
• Timely feature updates are important to keep in step with global innovation. It’s better to commit to SAC and a platform that enables quick, seamless, clean, and error-free upgrades.

SAC offers the power of augmented analytics that include conversational data searches; automated analytics including Smart Insights and Smart Discovery; and predictive analytics for identifying correlations and automatic forecasts.

• Conversational data searches are where the user simply puts in their query in the system in simple natural language. SAP BI had you searching for relevant data insights from tons of data, across different databases and models.
• With SAC, you can just ask a relevant question like ‘What were the sales of the product category xx in the APAC region between 2016-21?”. The system would show you the relevant analytics in a heartbeat.
• Automated analytics helps you extract relevant info from a database with just a click. There are times when you wouldn’t know the exact metrics and insight you want to derive from a report.
• With automated analytics, you can just select Smart Discovery and get an automated dashboard showcasing all relevant info from the database/report. Similarly, with Smart Insights – you can get pinpoint inferences from the report in direct points.
• Predictive analytics gives you the option to quickly identify correlations between your datasets and give a comparative (automated) report with relevant new info. You can also just select ‘automatic forecasts’ and the system would analyze data trends and show resultant extrapolated future trends (utilizing SAP BTP’s embedded AI and ML).

Get easy access to different ‘stories’ from different data models or departments under the ‘Catalog’ section. This gives the option to the superuser to evaluate all dashboards in a single session.

One very user-specific improvement in SAC over SAP BI is the ease of collaborative working and sharing of relevant reports. What does this mean?

• This is what you would get. You can simply schedule the receipt of a specific report from a dashboard for future data. You can add relevant users to the receiving list to easily collaborate with the teams.
• You can also add restrictions so that each user only gets the custom report that’s relevant to them – all by selecting parameters on the scheduling screen.
• It’s a one-stop shop for perfect intelligence and report sharing.

As SAC is cloud-based, built over SAP BTP (which has embedded IoT readiness), you can get real-time analytics at your fingertips anytime, anywhere. The systems and databases are updated in real-time; hence all dashboards and analytics are always in sync and accurate. Essentially, all departments in the company would work with the same set of info at all times.

SAP BI has the option of having mobile apps. However, SAC takes it many steps ahead with easy build options, smart workflows, clean databases, and intuitive designs. This means that mobile apps are much better, faster, in-sync with real-time updates, and can (overall) do much more than before.

Do not miss this opportunity to modernize your operations with the help of Crave InfoTech