Laying the yellow data road towards enterprise intelligence
Although becoming data-driven has been a high priority for many organizations, the myriad disruptions, and uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic made it a top necessity on their agenda. In fact, in a recent business intelligence survey conducted by IDC, 75% of respondents said that their executives had explicitly articulated the need to be more data-driven. Now, more than ever, companies need to be able to work in real-time to perform deeper analysis that drives more accurate planning and forecasting.
But executing this objective is easier said than done. In an effort to drive data intelligence, companies often find themselves faced with numerous challenges including high overhead costs associated with a mix of multiple software solutions dedicated to meeting specific lines of business requirements as well as additional data and analytics services that surface during the iterative data engineering, data science, and business analysis work.
Even with today’s abundance of data management technologies, both data engineering and business groups face ongoing challenges. While 65% of organizations continue to use a minimum of 10 different data engineering and management tools, 41% of mid-level managers waste at least one hour per day searching for and finding the data they need (IDC). These inefficiencies become increasingly costly and simply not sustainable in the long term.
To operate at maximum efficiency while meeting changing market requirements, organizations must:
Decrease the amount of time spent on managing data suppositories
Minimize or eliminate the need for ongoing integration of data across silos
Standardize the process for managing enterprise-wide governance, risk, and protocols
Ensure visibility into data assets to increase usability, privacy, and trust
Let's look more closely at how a unified cloud solution transforms the way organizations interact with data to make smarter decisions, and what this transformation could mean for your organization.
Benefits of a Unified Cloud Data Solution
A unified cloud data platform supports a wide range of analytic, operational, information access, and application development workloads as a single cloud service. As such it presents several technologies and business benefits.
Decreased data movement from disparate data sources minimizes the potential for errors while speeding up time-to-insight.
Enhanced trust through standardized governance and security and increased collaboration among business analysts, data scientists, and application developers.
Added support and autonomous updates minimize manual administrative activities and speed up innovation.
Overall, these benefits arm organizations with:
Faster insight
Greater control over the cost of data storage by
Minimized duplication of effort and overhead in data engineering and data intelligence processes
Leveraging Data for Modern Planning
While becoming data-driven is top of mind for business leaders, it's important to consider how to strategically leverage that data to drive optimal value while delivering on business outcomes - starting with planning. In a recent report from Radius Global Research, two-thirds of respondents stated that their company’s financial planning, forecasting, and reporting processes were highly inefficient, with 25 percent complaining that their budgeting process takes four months or longer.
To break the cycle, companies must embrace continuous planning, analysis, and reporting to improve the efficiency of their planning process while minimizing cost, and increasing the accuracy of their forecasts.
Leading organizations are increasingly adopting solutions that address the cohesive planning cycle, from data collection, analysis, and modeling, to reporting and forecasting, via a central platform. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), a unified cloud solution for business intelligence and enterprise planning, streamlines the planning, budgeting, and forecasting process to help your organization make better decisions and act with confidence.
Choose a Platform With Built-in Smart Capabilities
Emerging technologies like machine learning (ML), artificial technology, and IoT (Internet of Things) were once the stuff of science fiction. Today, they are making existing technology smarter and more efficient.
"83% of organizations have increased AI or ML budgets year-over-year." - Forbes
A dynamic cloud solution like SAC can play a critical role in helping you adopt these technologies without requiring outside integrations.
Using real-time data, SAP Analytics Cloud leverages embedded capabilities based on machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal relationships, hidden patterns, and outliers to turn data into insight, fast.
Integrated with smart capabilities, the SAC solution harnesses the power of analytics and business intelligence to unlock new value in:
Self-service data modeling and preparation with the ability to set key performance metrics, dimensions, and hierarchies and automate data.
Data exploration and visualization with interactive visualizations and data stories by slicing and dicing data, regardless of volume size.
Augmented analytics for the last mile of data-driven decision-making with machine-generated analytics and insights.
Simultaneously, users can seamlessly create and link financial and operational plans and realize the benefits of streamlined enterprise planning including:
Predictive planning for increased agility via predictive forecasting and machine learning tools.
Extended planning and analysis that enables cohesive planning across all lines of business by combining transactions, analytics, and planning with SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain.
Collaboration across plans on data points, reports, and stories with comments and group discussions in real-time, from any device.
To learn more about how to cut costs and create a data-driven intelligent enterprise in the cloud, download the SAP-sponsored IDC report Driving Enterprise Intelligence: The Benefits of a Unified Cloud Data Platform. The report covers:
How companies can minimize unexpected and unplanned spending on cloud data services to meet evolving analysis requirements.
Best practices for evaluating technology solutions for optimal data flow and associated data engineering processes.
The scope of productivity benefits of a fully managed, unified cloud data platform.
and more!
To learn more about how Analysis Prime can help your organization create an intelligent enterprise by embracing the future of planning and analysis request a live demo of SAP Analytics Cloud today or contact us for additional information.
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