Reporting and Analytics Management

Tap into your data – big and small

In today’s fast-paced environment, taking full advantage of massive amounts of data available to businesses is a prerequisite for success. You need to gather and quickly make sense of all data – large and small, in diverse forms, and on multiple platforms. This means going beyond spreadsheets and basic reports and moving to a fast, engaging, and visual way of presenting data.

What if you could pull data directly from your enterprise and personal sources, bringing them together in a repeatable, easily understood way without having to ask for help from IT? Just think if you could “point and click” to manipulate data, organizing and consolidating it the way you want it without a single line of code or an additional modeling layer. You can do all this and more with SAP Lumira software. This breakthrough solution redefines the notion of self-service information by giving you direct connectivity to enterprise data in relational databases, SAP Business Objects or SAP Crystal Server software semantic layers (universes), and personal data sources such as spreadsheets. By combining data from different sources and lines of business into a single view, you can answer questions quickly, without depending on IT. And when you connect to the SAP HANA platform, answers buried in massive amounts of data appear as quickly as you process thoughts.

Reduce data prep time with point and-click data manipulation

Business analysts typically have to “prepare” data before they even start an analysis or discovery process, consuming precious time and resources. You may want to eliminate a column you don’t need, add a new one that includes a formula, or aggregate data under two categories. For example, to view sales for convenience stores and independent grocery stores, data may be aggregated and renamed as a “small stores” group. SAP Lumira provides transformation tools to facilitate these mundane – but important – tasks. Using this innovative software, you can prepare data by:

• Enriching it with geographic and time hierarchies
• Automatically creating useful measures based on existing data
• Formatting and cleaning existing data (for example, duplicating, grouping, and trimming)
• Merging data sets based on a common attribute or key
• Adding sophisticated formulas without any coding

You can perform all of these transformations without having to write any scripts or code. And best of all, if the data is refreshed, your transformations are automatically applied to the new data.

Quickly create engaging visualizations

Once you’ve prepared your data, the next step is to use visualizations to convey key insights about your business, customers, and operations. Often, the most important insights can’t be gleaned from quantitative information, such as rows of numbers. You need powerful, interactive visualizations of data to truly see what’s most important. SAP Lumira lets you build visualizations with an engaging drag-and-drop interface. The result? Beautiful graphics and visualizations rendered in real time that support and enhance your iterative thought processes. Whether you create simple bar charts, display bubble charts on maps, or showcase a multidimensional chart, SAP Lumira gives you beautiful analytics to convey and share insights with minimal time and effort. You can:

• Surface patterns and relationships by selecting chart types suited for your analysis (for example, bar, radar, surface, tag cloud, bubble, and scatter charts)
• Identify trends with line and multiline charts
• Show the percentage of parts to a whole with pie charts and tree maps
• See the big picture at a glance and drill down into the details using filtering data in columns, facets, and charts
• Show data with geolocation context using country charts and geographic bubble charts

Improve time to insight and business agility

SAP Lumira software provides one of the fastest, most engaging ways to get answers from your data – both large and small. Empowering you to pull data directly from enterprise and personal data sources and bring it together in a repeatable way without IT assistance, the software redefines the notion of self-service information. Armed with point-and-click data manipulation, you can quickly organize and consolidate data however you want it – without writing a single line of code or creating an additional modeling layer. You can also enhance your data using semantic enrichment (such as geolocation and time dimensions). Plus, you can automate transformation workflows in a repeatable, self-service way without IT assistance. Using an engaging interface and beautiful visualizations, you can analyze data quickly and discover unique insights to share for rapid time to insight and business agility. And because the software can connect to the SAP HANA platform, you can instantly find answers – even when they are buried in massive volumes of data.

A Variety of Elements Readily Combined in a Report

SAP® Crystal Reports® software enables report authors to trans-form data from virtually any source into pixel-perfect, data-rich documents and deliver them to external and internal consumers. Based on reliable data from across your organization, these documents provide immediate value and answers to key questions.

Changing conditions in today’s fast-paced business environment require decision makers in any organization to be well informed and respond quickly to emerging opportunities to stay ahead of the competition. This means businesses across all industries must provide ready-to-consume information in operational and other reports to people internally and externally – including partners and customers. The reports must be mass personalized so they are individually  relevant and then delivered to hundreds or thousands of recipients. How can organizations adopt a flexible and scal-able reporting approach to deliver fast insight to decision makers?
The answer lies with SAP Crystal Reports, the de facto standard in reporting. This software continues a two-decade tradition of excellence in providing powerful, user-friendly, and dynamic reporting functionality. SAP Crystal Reports can help companies  of all sizes deliver personalized, highly formatted reports with relevant infor-mation to hundreds of thousands of business users. These documents may be operational reports necessary to  run day-to-day business or external, customer-facing documents. In either case, the reports deliver accurate information that enables decision makers  to answer critical questions at a glance and make solid decisions.

With SAP Crystal Reports, report authors can:

• Create highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports quickly
• Connect to data sources spread across the organization directly or through the common semantic layer
• Deliver personalized reports to business users in their preferred language and format and to their preferred destination (desktop, mobile device, or Web)

Interactive pixel-perfect reports

The stunning, sophisticated reports built with SAP Crystal Reports software give decision makers visibility into enterprise performance for a clearer view of the business. Personalized, professional-looking documents can be pushed to or pulled by consumers to their choice of destination and are available for ready access.
Flexible features such as on-report sorting, filtering, and the ability to drill down into detailed information allow business users to answer more questions with fewer reports, thus significantly reducing dependency on IT. Examples of formatted documents include commission statements, financial statements, invoices, purchase orders, renewal notices, mailing labels, and checks.

Enhanced, intuitive design environment

This user-friendly, best-in-class reporting solution provides an intuitive interface with efficient workflows that allow report authors to build elegant reports in a  matter of minutes (see the figure). They can use point-and-click techniques and can simply drag and drop objects into the “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) report canvas. Smart guide-lines help report authors insert, move, and align objects by automatically adjusting the layout of the report. The software also allows report authors to insert summaries, variances, and other custom calculations without any programming.

Powerful, flexible functionality

SAP Crystal Reports provides a wide range of charting and visualization functionality to make your reports more appealing and easier for business users to consume. Conditional formatting allows fine-grained control of report appearance, with rich formula language that can embed business logic with-
in reports. The integration of SAP Business Objects™ Dashboards software with SAP Crystal Reports enables report authors to leverage a comprehensive library of easy-to-use interactive charts, maps, gauges, and sliders and quickly embed them into their reports – again without writing any program code. The software gives report authors great flexibility in creating reports. For example, authors are not limited by their printer-specific page sizes; they can customize page sizes and page breaks and can combine portrait and landscape-oriented pages within the same report.

Superior Connectivity and Data Access

With SAP Crystal reports, you can tap into virtually any data source, whether SAP or non-SAP. You can connect either directly or through the new semantic layer.
The robust, patented semantic layer not only hides the complexity of underlying data sources but also enables an easier, more consistent experience across all data sources. The semantic layer also supports the reuse of hierarchies, calculated fields, and metadata, helping make key information available rapidly. In addition, the semantic layer offers multi-source universe functionality, delivering relevant information based on more than one data source. With broad and flexible access to data sources, including hierarchical sources, report authors can quickly turn any company data into compelling, feature-rich reports.

High-performance content delivery

SAP Crystal Reports runs on a flexible, scalable architecture to fit the needs of any size enterprise. You can publish reports to hundreds of thousands of business users inside and outside the organization. The reports can be made available on the Web, desktops, and mobile devices. Report authors can deliver information to meet the needs of business users in various roles inside and outside the company. For example, personalized commission statements can be published to thousands of recipients at a time, lowering your overall administration costs. SAP Crystal Reports also allows you to embed your reports in transactional soft-ware systems such as enterprise resource planning or customer relation-ship management applications. Business users can work more efficiently and effectively by staying within the same application for their reporting needs. Operational workflows can also be integrated in reports generated with SAP Crystal Reports by embedding Adobe Flex applications. For example, business users can use these embedded applications to make operational choices such as writing back to the database.

Multilingual information in a single deployment

For enterprises with global dealings in today’s interconnected business environment, working with multiple languages is a must. SAP Crystal Reports offers multilingual functionality that allows report authors to deliver reports in their business users’ native languages. Report authors can create a single report that can be published in multiple languages, enabling organizations to standardize on a single reporting solution. This reduces deployment costs and gives a larger number of people access to trusted information.

Crystal clear benefits

With SAP Crystal Reports, report authors can create highly formatted, professional reports that provide business users across the enterprise with a clear picture of business performance and help improve productivity and efficiency. The software offers a full spectrum of data connectivity, is flexible and customizable, and scales to produce high volumes of reports.

The upshot is that you can meet the varying needs of your diverse community of business users, inside and outside the organization, with minimal use of technical resources. Your business users can get answers to their questions and make decisions more quickly. And you can build stronger relationships with your business users, customers, and partners by delivering reliable, personalized information. Part of the SAP Business Objects portfolio of solutions, SAP Crystal Reports is an integral piece of a broader business intelligence (BI) strategy and provides information reliably and securely over the Web or within enterprise applications. SAP Business Objects solutions are open, action oriented, and connected. They deliver a complete, intuitive profile of business performance using any data from any application and any platform, and they encourage collaboration to improve decision making and resolve issues. SAP Crystal Reports scales to meet the needs of any size organization and leverages your investment in other SAP Business Objects BI solutions, reducing the overall cost of your enterprise BI deployments.