Let’s face it, as your business continues to grow; you might find it hard to adapt to changing circumstances with your on-premise financial software. Adapting to natural fluctuations in supply and demand, coupled with recent COVID-19 concerns, has forced many businesses to look for new ways to adapt to increased unpredictability. Although your business might be backed into a corner with your existing investments in infrastructure and time spent on previous implementations, a new cloud-based strategy might suggest a way forward for your financials. With SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC), analytics, and planning have been combined into one application offering the same power as your on-premise solutions but with increased business agility.
SAC allows users to view cost analysis for different business units, profitability dashboards and run predictive scenarios in real-time for those running S/4 HANA. This allows your business to accurately plan and create on-time reports with trends found by machine learning technology. Although this won’t account for all unpredictable scenarios, businesses can also receive additional agility benefits by running analytics on the cloud. SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) reduces the need for local data storage for financials that previously made it difficult for employees to access sensitive data. Cloud also supports new remote work circumstances that may otherwise involve physical drop-offs of information or employees needing to go back to the office.
Benefits of the Cloud Model
A cloud-based planning and analytics solution can solve the problem of agility by granting access to anyone, anywhere. How so? SAC is hosted by a remote server instead of one located on-premise. Data is stored by your SAP system, processed by the remote server, and made available to access and create dashboards for analytics. Multiple employees can access data at a given time, and your business also can adapt to changing circumstances.
A Gartner study assures us that this is still secure, and data breaches are more likely to be caused by poor configurations internally. Other perceived risks can also be offset by benefits including:
No Infrastructure Costs
No upfront infrastructure costs are involved in a cloud solution. Instead, your business will pay a per-user/month subscription to use SAP Analytics Cloud as much as you need. Since all the models and stories are stored in the cloud, bulky systems to contain new information as your business grows will no longer be required.
On-Demand Scalability
With SAC’s pay-per-use flexibility, end-users can scale quickly based on the demands of the business. With SAP Cloud Platform, your organization is only paying for what you need and use. This will save your business time and money in the long run, as there are natural fluctuations in workloads. Scaling on demand also means that in unexpected peaks, your business can allow for a heavier workload. In contrast, organizations with an on-premise ERP system only have as much capability as their infrastructure allows.
Automatic Updates
By using an SAP cloud solution, you eliminate the hardware costs and additional burdens while still getting the same modern software capabilities. Therefore, when it comes time to do routine updates, SAP will take care of it, and your business will always have the latest version of the program without any additional costs.
With continuous updates, the ConvergentIS team has found roadmap features which have been subsequently delivered to be useful. Like other SAP customers have pointed out, SAP has followed this roadmap very closely, updating and improving the product. This gives customers the confidence that the product should remain on their radar even if it appears that non-standard use cases haven't been included in the product just yet.
Dashboards, calculations, and presentations of KPIs used to give a financial overview of your business still offer valuable functionality to any company looking to increase their agility. If your business is still unsure of SAC's alignment to organizational requirements, the 90-day free trial can be a great way to test it out, even with restrictions in place on trial.
Although we consider ourselves a Small/Medium Sized Enterprise (SME), larger businesses can still enjoy benefits such as quick deployment from SAC since the platform can support up to one million users and connect 200 SAP and non-SAP sources. The Analytics solution is also not limited to those using an on-premise database, since live data connections to SAP S/4HANA access your data directly without any replication.
Throughout this post, we defined business agility as a business's ability to respond quickly and cost-effectively to changes in the environment. Cloud is the tool that is changing how companies operate in all areas, one being financials, viewing analytics, and creating predictive models. Storing data in this way accelerates the connection between new technology trends and business transformation to achieve revenue growth even in the face of uncertainty.
To see if there is a business case for exploring analytics, we encourage you to download our Build Your Business Case workbook.