There’s no denying that many companies today are striving to become Insights driven. Unlike traditional enterprises, these organisations aim to grow exponentially while keeping a data-centric approach at their core. The right information to the right person at the right time is proving to be a central driver for business growth.

As organisations are trying to tackle the global COVID-19 crisis, Cloud has emerged as a critical enabler for modern businesses. A scalable, secure, cloud-based, agile solution can deliver valuable insights for enhanced decision-making and can prove to be a game changer for any organisation. Cloud-based solutions are helping businesses to keep pace by offering the benefits like reduced IT costs, improvement in data security and disaster recovery, increase in speed and overall process efficiency, scalability, flexibility etc.

While most organisations have access to a plethora of data, without intelligent analysis, context and insight into what that data means for the business is of very little value. Forrester research shows that 79% of small and mid-size companies want to extract more value from big data, and as part of that, 80% want to become more advanced in their ability to perform analytics. It also shows that insights-driven firms are 39% more likely to report year-over-year revenue growth of 15% or more.

• Inconsistent level of quality among data sources
• Data materialise too fast, difficult to manage
• Too many unconnected data sources

To make the most of their existing data, companies must become insights-driven by letting data insights genuinely transform their organisation. Data to Insights guided journey requires predictive and prescriptive analytics. These capabilities enabled through machine learning will help organisations uncover insights that will yield more actionable outcomes.

Powered by sophisticated models and machine learning technology, SAP Analytics Cloud reveals insights that help you make data-driven decisions confidently. It unifies Business Intelligence, Augmented & Predictive Analytics and planning capabilities into one cloud environment. This holistic platform drives reporting, forecasting and predicting functionalities as a standalone solution.

SAP Analytics Cloud improves decision making within an enterprise and improves performance metrics across departments. It’s a highly flexible platform which can be integrated with other applications to eliminate the hassles of switching between applications. This ready-to-deploy Cloud-based solution helps you to streamline all your Insights-driven decision making by connecting your people, information and ideas.

• Use SAC to uncover trends, patterns and correlations in your enterprise-wide data to gain a holistic view of your planning landscape.
• Utilize it as a single planning solution across the organisation to increase engagement and accuracy when creating plans, budgets, and forecasts in different lines of business.
• Take end-to-end planning decisions using built-in smart features like automated reporting, financial modelling, allocations, and smart insights.
• Crucial areas like Operational Workforce Planning (by position and job classification) and Strategic Workforce Planning can be done using SAC in order to heavily enhance your HR Operations and People Analytics capabilities.

• Equip your decision makers to understand:
  1. How the business as a whole is operating
  2. Redundancies and opportunities
  3. Current and future financial outcomes
  4. How those drivers impact business operations

• This automated technology enables you to avoid agenda-driven and biased decision making by revealing the story of what drives your business.
• Train predictive models with existing data and apply them to new data to predict future outcomes, segment the customer base, and automate decisions.
• Built-in Machine Learning algorithms automatically guide data discovery and help detect previously hidden influencers and patterns.
• Search to Insight in SAC allows users to pose a question conversationally at any time and receive a real-time response expressed visually.
• Get real-time insights into purchasing spend across various dimensions, such as spend by quarter, supplier, material group, purchasing organisation and group, plant, and supplier country.

• Explore, analyze and visualize the organisation’s data to get actionable information with intuitive self-service analytics.
• Get end-to-end data management tools and analytics to support smart data access, preparation, and quality governance while aligning business processes.
• SAP Analytics Cloud offers board and CXO-level analytics through SAP Digital Boardroom. A next-generation real-time dashboard experience that presents information graphically and intuitively to enable top leaders to understand the past, oversee business execution, and simulate the future.
• Integrate your data sources in a single view to discover, visualize and collaborate with other business users in real time and share your findings with customers, suppliers, and partners.

Enterprises can do away with the traditional solutions and opt for this feature-rich solution to get:

• Unified data truth – Bid adieu to disparate data sources to establish a single and trusted source of data truth.
• Improved decision making – Empower employees at all levels to use analytics on big and small data sets to instantly generate insights that facilitate decision making. 
• Time and cost savings – Speed deployment and lower costs with preconfigured industry and line-of-business content.
• Wide distribution and accessibility – Integrate existing apps with SAC, share and access the data with the devices that one’s familiar with.
• Customized solution – Work with SAP partners to tailor the solution to your exact needs
• Become an SAP Intelligent Enterprise – By embedding analytics into existing applications, eliminate reporting silos to increase productivity, make better and more confident decisions, and increase overall business efficiency.

Becoming insights-driven often requires companies to embrace new capabilities and technologies that, in many cases, may demand significant integration effort. Organisations need to rethink upon their decision-making approach and reimagine the process using Analytics and Cloud combination in this ever-changing business landscape. SAP Analytics Cloud is transforming decision making using its Enterprise Planning, Augmented Analytics and Business Intelligence capabilities. Users can get all the desired functionalities in a single solution enabling them to make intelligent decisions using real-time, hidden and contextual insights to boost business outcomes.

For those interested in discovering more about this, please check out this space in the coming days  for our whitepaper on SAP Analytics Cloud.