This week Keith Bowles the director of business intelligence from Peabody Energy gave a presentation to over 500 attendees during an SAP virtual event focused on business analytics.
Keith spent the majority of his time showing the audience their BI portal that you could call Peabody’s source of truth. Really cool stuff!
BI at Peabody has been successful due to executive adoption, which was accomplished by providing reports and dashboards on mobile devices. Easy access to data has helped executives make decisions anywhere. Having the ability to tap into the status of Peabody’s business, executives can always align with the organizational objectives.
If you don’t have time to watch the entire presentation below is a summary of the topics Keith addressed
0:00-4:35 — Keith sets the scene with what SAP BI solutions Peabody is using (FP4, BI4, Explorer and much, much more). He also provided very compelling reasons why Peabody needed a BI solution. And he finished with their overall BI platform map, which included the connection of data to mobile devices
4:35 — Not even five minutes into the presentation Keith shows the audience Peabody’s BI portal. One key element of this portal is for Peabody to use this to push BI self-service out to the organization. All employees in various functions can use BI to generate reports
13:45 — Keith spends a few minutes showing the value SAP BI widgets have given executives to better see reports directly on their desktops. Keith’s team set-up the widgets based on what are the most important reports executives need regularly
16:07 — In a day Peabody was running SAP mobile analytics. With someone else it would have taken them five weeks!!
22:43 — Keith leaves the demos to share a long list of benefits Peabody has experienced with their BI project
23:08 — If you are thinking about a BI platform Keith gives advice on how to successfully run a BI project
3M has been using SAP Business Intelligence for 15 years to run their business critical systems. Over 25,000 users in 60 countries are using SAP, which means there is no time for system outages.
Recently 3M installed the latest version of SAP Business Intelligence 4.0 for its connectivity with mobile devices, which allows users to dive-deeper into information.
Watch a video from 3M about how they are using SAP Business Intelligence software.
SAP continues to expand BI to more mobile devices. Mobile BI was first launched on iPad and now the new app is available on Google Play for Android devices.
Read more about the features and see a demo on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet in a blog post from Nic Smith, head of mobile BI marketing for SAP.
On the third day of SapphireNOW in Orlando, SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka announced the general availability of a new solution for data discovery called SAP Visual Intelligence. Read more details here. This new data discovery tool complements the existing SAP BusinessObjects Explorer product by providing a new way for business analysts to access (more...)
Are you working on your NCAA Basketball picks for March Madness? SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for the iPad and iPhone, together with SAP BusinessObjects BI On-Demand (SAP’s cloud BI solution), create a killer combo that will not only help you analyze your business but also your basketball data and come up with interesting insights that could (more...)
As data volumes continue to increase and businesses shift into the next generation of data storage, analytics capabilities will be the front-end visualization technology that consumes this BIG data in real-time. To tackle this BIG data challenge SAP provides analytics capabilities that capture the power of in-memory computing technology (SAP HANA) and deliver information in meaningful ways to drive business value.
SAP customers are already beginning to take their data to Level 11 (thank you Spinal Tap). Here are a few extreme analytics examples:
By Steve Lucas, General Manager, Business Analytics and Technology, SAP
The phrase “mobile first” perfectly summarizes the new priorities around business intelligence and the end-user experience. Mobile first means that when thinking about business intelligence (BI) or analytic tools or clients, the first design process is not for a PC. In the spirit of delivering compelling, interesting, and reliable mobile solutions, we laid out our plan to make the SAP mobile experience an outstanding one.
With the possibility of a post-Flash era coming (see my recent Forbes blog), you might be asking “What’s SAP’s mobile analytics strategy?” The answer to that is actually pretty straightforward and consists of three analytics-specific experiences we are currently delivering or plan to deliver to our customers.
A structured mobile analytics experience that will bridge existing BI content with mobile devices. Today, we enable customers to extend their existing BI investments to their mobile device with SAP BusinessObjects Mobile.
A semi-structured mobile analytics experience called high-definition analytics, focused on new content. Today, we call this SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and some exciting enhancements are just around the corner in early 2012, including a new feature set called Exploration Views.
A completely open mobile analytics experience, where a user can define any mobile analytic/BI app he or she dreams up using a simple design tool, like having a mobile analytics design studio.
Watch my recent presentation from SapphireNOW that covers this roadmap in more detail.
Flexible Access to Analytics
Our goal is to create an overall experience that supports a range of mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, RIM OS, Windows Mobile, QNX, etc.) and flexible ways for people to access analytics data on those devices.
If someone wants to access predefined reports and analytics on an iPad, SAP BusinessObjects Mobile can help.
If a user wants to have a high-definition dashboard with flexible access to any data in a single view, he or she can use SAP BusinessObjects Explorer.
If someone wants to have a completely custom analytic app on their iPhone where a giant button turns green when a KPI is met, mobile apps from SAP is the way to go.
The good news is that both SAP BusinessObjects Mobile BI and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer have mobile apps available today in the Apple App Store and will support additional key mobile platforms, including Android and RIM in 2012. Additionally, in Q1 2012 we’re releasing a new version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer with offline capability and a new feature called Exploration Views! A preview is available on the App Store today. Search “SAP Experience”, look for the full release in XI4 feature pack 3). We also plan on launching a new app this year that will be like a mobile analytics design studio.
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report visualized on the iPad:
Big data with SAP HANA analyzed by SAP BusinessObjects Explorer:
Preview of the next generation of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, coming in early 2012:
BI Collaboration in the Cloud with SAP StreamWork
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention SAP StreamWork. While it’s not core analytics, everyone reading this should check out www.streamwork.com and see how users can collaborate on BI data in the cloud…absolutely killer! In fact, SAP StreamWork can be used today to collaborate within all of our mobile apps – just enable email access within an SAP StreamWork account and start collaborating instantly!
It’s pretty compelling that we have a broad offering of mobile solutions that deliver an insanely great experience. I can’t wait for all of you to see the new apps we’re launching this year.
Plans for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards in the Works, Too
I bet you’re wondering where the comments are on SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (the product formerly known as Crystal Xcelsius).
The most important message is that we aren’t going to leave customers in a lurch and plan to deliver an HTML 5 version in 2012. This may not make life perfect, but it’ll provide a way to get the incredibly valuable content and assets available in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards files, over to all mobile devices. More specific timeframes will be communicated in Q1 2012. So for all of our loyal dashboard customers out there - stay tuned and rest assured that we will deliver an insanely great experience for mobile dashboards.
The bottom line, as you can see in the roadmap graphic (click for full view) below – we’re working hard to make an outstanding user’s experience…viva la mobile!
What are the roadmap priorities for business analytics solutions from SAP in 2012? What’s SAP’s vision around systems of engagement? What does systems of engagement mean? What are the five compelling trends that accelerate systems of engagement?
You’ll also hear directly from SAP customers Sharp, Cobb Energy, FreshDirect, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing as they discuss business challenges, how they resolved them, and the benefits of using business analytics solutions from SAP.
SAP and NetBase recently announced a new partnership for social insight and analysis. With this partnership, SAP is hoping to push the NetBase product to far more than the usual suspects in the marketing department. “Sales people can use it to fine-tune pricing strategies and get closer to customers, while consumer product development groups can improve their planning processes. What trends in fashion are going to be relevant next spring? If you’re going to be doing offshore production, you need to know now,” said Byron Banks, SAP.
The SAP® Social Media Analytics application by NetBase is an on-demand, subscription-based solution that your organization can use to gauge net sentiment – the net result of analytics related to any topic mentioned on social media sites. Enter a topic in the application to quickly see a summary of that topic’s net sentiment. The application’s sophisticated, natural-language processing engine also extracts the following insights from postings of social media users:
Likes/dislikes
Behaviors (buy, want, return)
Emotions (love, hate)
Intensity of emotions (like/love)
Learn more by watching this overview video:
Here are few interesting quotes in response to the recent news.
“The real value in social media analytics, of course, comes in using it to understand the business, says Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst with Forrester Research. SAP’s plans to allow customers to use SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase, as the application will be called, to leverage unstructured data with the structured data in their enterprise systems could be extremely valuable for its customers.” Zach Hofer-Shall, Forrester
“The new SAP Social Media Analytics service aims to bring more consumer-centric smarts to SAP customers by pairing NetBase semantic search and analytics with SAP’s own business intelligence expertise.” Barb Darrow, GigaOm
“Just as the SuccessFactors deal is meant to help SAP go after Salesforce.com in the cloud, the NetBase partnership will help SAP respond to–and, it hopes, outflank–the Salesforce social enterprise strategy, which was advanced this year through that company’s acquisition of Radian6.” Doug Henschen, InformationWeek
Read more about news about the new partnership here:
