This ppt demo shows and advanced forecasting process to give guidance to planning units with the help of a sophisticated statistical forecast. It highlights also the benefits of agile visualization of contextual data as well as the ease of collaboration between various teams even crossing organizational boundaries.
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Henner Schliebs
Analytics Audience Marketing
@hschliebs
henner
henner.schliebs@sap.com
hschliebs
Editor's Notes
#3: This demo showcases the use of SAP Predictive Analysis including visualizations with SAP Lumira to a Finance Audience. The demo company is a manufacturing example, although the fact that the data is pulled from COPA shows that it is applicable to many more industries as only data changes, but the structure remains similar.Company: Manufacturing CompanySystems: Base data: SAP CO-PA, in this case leveraging the COPA Accelerator to have the data stored in HANA. Actuals. Base data: SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, Version for SAP NetWeaver running on HANA. Plan Data. Additional Data is pulled from external sources and merged into the model within SAP Predictive Analysis: S&P 500, Commodity Price Indexes, Oil & Gas Prices, Unit Labor Costs for various markets etc. Advanced Analytics: SAP Predictive Analysis (with embedded SAP Lumira)This is the home screen if the Controller logs on to the system for creating a new analysis.The corporate controller wants to connect to the data set stored in HANA with the support of the COPA Accelerator having COPA data in HANA is an easy task. Plan data has been added and consolidated coming from the decentral planning process managed by SAP Business Planning and Consolidation. But any other planning system or Business Suite could be a realistic scenario as well as HANA offers easy data management functionality.Click on the Documents button on the left.
#4: This brings you to the page where to connect to your data:You see that many possibilities exist, the easiest is to connect to your HANA box.Click on Connect to SAP HANA in the pop-up window to get to the data view that you are familiar with when you normally work in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
#5: An easy to use user interface that really looks familiar to finance professionals dealing a lot with spreadsheets. Note the columns that show the various dimensions your COPA system provides you with.To give you a high level overview of your data you can activate the facets view.Click on the facets button top left.
#6: This will show you the data in a different way highlighting the data and its distribution to each analysis dimension as well as the occurrences per dimension. First add-on to an excel spreadsheet or the Business Suite and a good starting point for further analysis.But now we want to do some advanced analytics.Agile Visualization with built-in SAP LumiraThe power of Predictive Finance starts with visualizing the existing data to find points for improving your company performance. So the corporate controller wants to see the geographical spread of the companys profits.Click on the Visualize button top center
#7: The interface changes to the graphical creation page where the controller simply picks the type of visualization (s)he wants to create.Click on the icon with maps button top right.
#8: This screen lets the user choose a geographical view from a list. In this case (s)he wants to see a map that shows the profit by color.Click in the Geo Choropleth Chart part highlighted in blue in the drop-down window
#9: Now we want to pick the relevant measures and dimensions (s)he wants to visualize, so we have profit as the measure and want to have it by the geographic dimension. As there are many we need to pick it from a list.In real life these analyses would be stored and just refreshed with new data, so please see this as an intro to how to set this up.Click on the Geography Dimension box center right.
#10: Then click on Country as we want the market unit level breakdown.
#11: 4 easy clicks to create a visually appealing picture that allows the controller to tell a nice story to the seniors in the next meeting:This visualization is now stored and will be used later potentially to either create a dashboard, to share it directly with regional controllers or simply to have it as a constant report for future use.Click on the + bottom right
#12: This brings you to other saved visualizations that get refreshed data from the COPA system instantly.It shows the so called tag cloud providing an instant view into your most profitable customers. The size shows the profits, the color the level of revenues these customers are generating. Only one of many possibilities SAP Lumira visualizations can deliver.Click on the + bottom right
#13: What are my most profitable products I sell? Want to know? This new report shows it to you in a second.You might want to drill into the details for Disk Drive 10 as the profits were stagnating more or less during the last 12 months.Click on the + bottom right
#14: Now how about plans? We all know that financial plans are consolidated and intergrated versions coming from the decentralized planning exercises we all love. These numbers represent a fair estimation of the desired outcome per business unit.This is the direction the company WANTS to go. The quality of this plan is only as good as the combined input from many planners. How about if we use some more advanced mechanisms to help us here?Predictive Analyses to provide guidancePredictive functionality can pull the gut feeling, hopes and desires and guesstimation out of the equation and provide valuable insight into your corporate performance. It can show correlations between various input factors that you were not aware of before (not like oil price increase for a machinery producing company, but more sophisticated correlations like does the amount of employee related cost influence my stock price? kind of correlations. In the best case you can define a model the serves as a prescriptive model to learn what is the best thing that could happenIn our case we simply want some guidance to the planners out there for the next iteration of their plan.Click on the Predict button top center
#15: This is where the controller either creates a model (if able to do, it is a click-exercise but might need some basic statistical knowledge) or selects from existing models.In our case the model is proven with a high level of confidence and includes external data that has been merged to the COPA / BPC data that we are using. External data includes but is not limited to S&P 500, Commodity Price Indexes, Oil & Gas Prices, Unit Labor Costs for various markets.We now want to apply the model to our data.Click on the Run button top center
#16: SAP Predictive Analysis now generates a statistical forecast taking all existing information plus the external data into the calculation. HANA provides for a fantastic performance that saves a lot of time. And: you do not need this PhD in the basement for this. The finance guy is in control!The result is visualized in this graph:Please see the discrepancy between the plan and the statistical forecast. You might want the business units heads factor this in when re-iterating the next planning cycle.To do so you can leverage the built-in collaboration capabilities and share a dashboard that you quickly pull together from the saved visualizations to have a better and common understanding of the analyses you have been pursuing in the last couple of minutes.CREATE A DASHBOARD AND COLLABORATEClick on the Compose button top center
#17: Quickly drag and drop in your visualizations that you have created. Tell the story of profitable customers, regions and products and that it looked pretty amazing. But then you came across the planned profits which seem unrealistic to you given that the statistical forecast showed you slightly lower numbers.Include as many pages as you want, make it nice with including meaningful pictures (if you want to use it at the next steering committee meeting) and even give it interactive functionality to drill into geographies, product dimensions or time hierarchies or customers.Very easy, quick and sustainable.The result has to go out to your teams.Click the Share button top center
#18: You have plenty of options. Share via e-mail sending the file, write back into HANA for enterprise reporting purposes, publish to the Explorer for management visibility, publish to the SAP JAM Collaboration platform or as in our example publish to Lumira Cloud for the regional teams to see wherever they are.Click on the Publish to SAP Lumira Cloud button top center
#19: Just enter your credentials (if not stored) and off you go after hitting connect