Integrated Analytics: SAP Analytics Cloud now embe...
Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
we are living in challenging times. I hope you and your loved ones are and will all stay healthy. Good Luck!
I am thrilled to open a new chapter: With the release 2020, SAP S/4HANA on premise integrates SAP Analytics Cloud for an embedded experience for business users.
Check out my new blog for details and please refer to Answer 14 below.
Questions have been raised about direct access to the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud. The longer explanation can be found below.
Upfront: The embedded SAP Analytics Cloud is fully managed by SAP S/4HANA Cloud. There is no need to log on to the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud and it is actually not possible.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud exposes the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud functionality through Fiori applications and this is all customers need to work with it.
Below you find my blog, which I will continue to update.
Thank you for your continued interest,
Rolf
.................................
To get us started, let me share a demo recording with you and share the key capabilities
Pre-defined Dashboards included in Fiori navigation
Intuitive ad-hoc reporting with Data Analyzer (scroll to 7:35)
Key user enhancements using "Manage KPIs and Reports" (scroll to 10:00)
Q: Why does SAP S/4HANA Cloud embed SAP Analytics Cloud?
A: Next to integrated operational processes, it takes first-class analytics to make an enterprise intelligent: Business users expect pre-defined reporting, seamlessly embedded into their daily work. They expect personalized access to data and ad-hoc analytical capabilities to get as much value out of their enterprise data as possible. And with the deep integration of SAP Analytics Cloud into the solution, this is exactly what SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers get with the 1911 release.
A: For each SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant, a new SAP Analytics Cloud tenant is provided. The SAP Analytics Cloud accesses the ABAP CDS views live, using the transient analytical queries generated automatically for the CDS views. Please look at the Architecture diagram in Figure 1: High Level Architecture. SAP Analytics Cloud UIs will be embedded in iFrames and published on the Fiori Launchpad.
All relevant SAP Analytics Cloud features – from tenant provisioning and connectivity to content management and lifecycle – have been published as APIs, so the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud can be “remote controlled” by the embedding applications. These APIs are available to other applications and even Partners.
This means, that the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud is completely managed by SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Customers do not need to log on to the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud specifically, nor can they.
Q: Does “embedded SAP Analytics Cloud” go beyond a simply iFrame integration?
A: Yes! SAP Analytics Cloud is deeply embedded into the Fiori UX paradigms: Launched from the Fiori launchpad and based on live data connections and thus up-to-date information, SAP Analytics Cloud stories are integrated by means of a “wrapper application”: This software takes care of offering screen-variant saving and personalization features as well as intend-based navigation between analytical and operational applications. Role-based assignment of the SAP Analytics Cloud Stories is also available, and the content lifecycle is also fully handled by SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
A lab preview showing screen variants and Intend-based navigation can be found in Figure 2. Of course, users will not be able to simultaneously trigger both option. These options have been overlaid in one screen for simplicity.
Figure 2: Screen Variants and Intend-based Navigation (edited to show both features in one screen)
Q: What scenarios are supported? In which way are embedded and enterprise tenants different?
A: The embedded SAP Analytics Cloud uses the live data connection to the embedding SAP S/4HANA Cloud data exclusively. Thus, up-to-date dashboards and ad-hoc data analyzer scenarios as well as the consumption of analytical applications are supported. Incidentally, the authorization concept of S/4HANA Cloud remains valid as well.
Other SAP Cloud applications and also SAP partners will eventually also offer embedded analytics and thus spin off embedded SAP Analytics Cloud tenants. In any given customer situation, one might thus find several embedded SAP Analytics Cloud tenants, each working exclusively for the embedding application. They are also fully managed by the respective embedding application. The embedded SAP Analytics Cloud tenant is available only in the scope of the embedding application and cannot be used for any other application or 3rd party data. It is not necessary to directly log on to the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud and the the case of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it is not possible even. SAP S/4HANA Cloud exposes the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud functionality through Fiori applications and this is all customers need to work with it.
If you are interested in scenarios that require data acquisition, e.g. planning or prediction, or a cross application scenario, you need to license an enterprise SAP Analytics Cloud tenant in addition.
See Figure 3: Embedded and Enterprise scenarios for details.
The embedded tenant does not interfere with the enterprise tenant, so you can continue to connect from the enterprise tenant as if the embedded did not exist. To save potential double efforts, means to move content from the embedded to the enterprise tenant are being looked at.
Q: Do all SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers receive the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud or do I need to apply for it specifically?
A: No need to apply or trigger anything explicitely. By now, all SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers may use the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud, as all required tenants have been provisioned.
Q: How do SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers receive the embedded SAC? Does an additional scope item need to be implemented? How much effort does that create?
A: After the upgrade, dedicated scripts spin off a new SAP Analytics Cloud tenant for each S/4HANA Cloud tenant (so, one for your Q and one for your P system). These scripts also set up the live data connection between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Cloud and finally hook SAP Analytics Cloud into to common user management. Thus, the entire system landscape enhancement is fully automated.
For some of the new stories or data analyzer reports, a scope item has to be activated first.
This is a small one-time effort. Please check Katharina Klug's newly-released overview blog for details and documentation: every story or data analyzer report with an asterix (*) requires a scope item activation.
Q: What can customers expect in terms of predefined dashboards?
A: The last step of the landscape provisioning is the automatic installation of so-call business content. SAP Analytics Cloud models and stories are installed in your tenants and they are ready to run.
The best overview of the content built for the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud in SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be found in Katharina Klug's newly-released overview blog.
This blog will continuously be updated, so please find the latest information in that blog.
Below are the links that I shared in the past for your reference:
The first delivery focused on Finance. For more details, please check Katharina Klug's blog.
Additional stories/dashboards have been included in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud delivery of February 2020 (release name 2002), check out the "Analytics" section of Katrin Deissner's blog.
A: Yes, by making a copy of the pre-delivered dashboard and modifying the copy. Actually, this functionality will be made available in the release 2002 according to current plans. Until then, business users may use the screen variant saving to personalize the stories for their needs.
A: Yes. SAP S/4HANA Cloud extensibility concepts also apply to content: Key users can use the already existing Fiori application “Manage KPIs and Report” to build their own stories with the intuitive what-you-see-is-what-you-get WYSIWYG SAP Analytics Cloud designer. You may even create your custom ABAP CDS view and build your own content on top of this.
Q: Where can I find detailed information about the new features and how to use them?
A: Given you have the necessary key user authorizations, you may create your own dashboards and data analyzer reports. Let me point you to the following very detailed blogs by Avinash Kumar. They come with screen shots and step-by-step explanations how to ...
A: SAP Analytics Cloud artefacts will be moved to receiving tenants using the standard SAP S/4HANA Cloud mechanisms. SAP ensures, that content and other configurations or enhancements (like your custom CDS view) are consistently treated automatically.
Technically, the Analytics Content Network (ACN), an integral component of SAP Analytics Cloud, takes care of moving content between tenants. This technical process has once more been included into the Fiori tool set and thus customers do not need to trigger any additional processes to move content.
Q: Does the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud replace any other technology or product?
A: No, it does not. It is an additional offer to support dashboard and data analysis. If at a later state technology or products will be substituted by SAC, this will be announced 2 releases in advance as always.
Q: Is the embedded scenario restricted to SAP S/4HANA Cloud? What about on premise or STE?
A: Yes, the embedded scenario is restricted to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The complete embedded experience is not available for SAP S/4HANA on premise, nor for the STE (single tenant edition).
However, with the release 2020, SAP S/4HANA on premise integrates SAP Analytics Cloud for an optimized experience for business users by offering a similar wrapper code. Please check the my new blog for details.
In fact, from a business user perspective, there is not much difference: The integration works in much the same way for SAP S/4HANA on premise and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In both scenarios, the business user launches the SAP Analytics Cloud story from the personal Fiori Launchpad, it opens in the iFrame and screen variants and intent-based navigation are supported.
The business user experience is therefore similar, except for one aspect: Data Analyzer reports are not offered for SAP S/4HANA on premise users, this feature is available in the cloud only.
Can you please clarify if the embedded scenario is available for S/4HANA Cloud - STE? I suspect not but wanted to understand if its on the roadmap or not.
thank you for reaching out. I can confirm your suspicion 🙂
The embedded scenario will not be available for STE edition of S/4HANA Cloud.
Technically, the STE is close to the S/4HANA on premise version. I have already outlined plans to offer embedding capabilities for the on premise version, though I cannot promise.
Once that comes, it should not be too difficult to also offer it for the STE.
How to know if our Q system on 1911 has been integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud ? In the FAQ it states that some scripts will run to enable this? how do we know that scripts are run.? I tried to use the Manage KPI and Reports app and as per documentation I tried to create a Story but no such option available to do so.
The upgrade of customer tenants (Q first, P later) has just started. It will be a phased approach with the goal to upgrade all S/4HANA Cloud tenants for customers by the end of this year. So you may have to be a little patient.
The clearest indication - if you have the authorization to use the key user tool - is the new "story" tab in Manage KPIs and Reports.
I checked my Q system which is on 1911, the "Manage KPI and Reports" App does not have the "Story" tab. The message is far clear now, I have to wait to try.
I see the embedding application is S/4 HANA Cloud, so could it be possible to create an SAC story with a grid for planning and send/write plan data from the SAC story Grid to the ACDOCP table in hana database.
for the time being, planning capabilities are not included in the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud. The scenario you describe, which is a valid one, points to the Enterprise scenario.
Understand the upgrade has just started and it's in a phased approach.
How would we know which phase we (customer) will be on to get the embedded SAC on our Q and P systems? Any contact person we can reach out to find out the exact dates of the roll out to our systems?
Appreciate your feedback as we are very keen and excited to use the functionality since the Q upgrade recently 🙂
Our operations team has provisioned the first embedded SAP Analytics Cloud tenants to match the Q-tenants for the first group of customers and over the next weekend (Nov. 23/24) the productive P tenants will follow.
Once this has been completed successfully, more and more customers will follow - based on the experience and also customer feedback gained in the first phase.
Much as I would like, I am afraid, I cannot offer a contact person for you, nor share a detailed plan.
Best regards,
Rolf
Do you foresee similar embedding capabilities for the Fiori Front-end Server? Having no S4HANA system but only CRM/ECC in the landscape, connected to FES we would like to embed the SAC stories, perfectly using native embedding scenario. If I understand it correctly, the only way is to "hardode" the link to the particular story in a Launchpad Tile. Could you please confirm it? 🙂
yes, I can confirm your assumption: The SAP S/4HANA Cloud is required. The Fiori Front-end server alone cannot offer the end-to-end embedding experience.
It is possible to add the link to an SAC story in a Fiori tile and it will open up the story but in a new browser window. This might suffice, but the tight integration into the Fiori experience -- and of course the automated provisioning - comes with S/4HANA Cloud.
Good news is we now have the embedded SAC in our Q system and the new apps are working!
Bad news is that we cannot say the same for our P system - getting the "fail whale" error message "It seems your profile is not configured for this system. Please contact your system administrator, or end this session and try again later."
I thought the live data connection between SAC and SAP S/4HANA Cloud is automatic (as per our Q system)
Who should we contact to get this working for our P system? We have raised a ticket to SAP but it's been moved from one team to another without any resolution.
In S4HC best practice scope item like 4DP for liquidity planning with SAC or 3Y0 sales planning with SAC, there are some input typing from end user. I suppose this is using SAC planning capability. Does it indicate extra SAC planning license ? and does it mean it's under import connection instead of live connection?
you are right: These scope items refer to planning capabilities in SAC and thus require the Enterprise scenario with data acquisition -- with the extra SAC planning license.
Another question is how is the SAC OEM data center mapping with the S4HC data center? Like my customer use S4HC data center in China, does it mean all the embedded SAC will come from one OEM data center in China? or maybe from different data center globally?
I cannot share details, however, we try to make sure that the tenants for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud are co-located in the same data center or in the same region. We are of course aiming for short geographical distances ton ensure fast responses.
Hi Rolf, very interesting and providing a great overview what to expect. I especially like the "intend-based navigation / jump-to". I am from the Analytics "side" and I think the report-to-report interface available with BW is a great feature and I was already looking for this in the SAC context, but unfortunately it is not available at the moment and also not on the development list.
I was quite happy to read in the questions section that the wrapper application (coding) is planned for Q3/2020 also for the S/4 on prem. Will the intend-based navigation also planned for the on-prem implemenation?
Yes, according to current plans the intend-based navigation will be made available for embedded SAP Analytics Cloud in SAP S/4HANA on premise, too.
For me this is an important and attractive feature and I believe customers will expect it to work once we offer "embedded for on prem".
I cannot commit, though. This is the current state of our plans ...
SAP has set up a common user management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud. So, technically all S/4HANA Cloud users can access the embedded Analytics.
Please keep in mind, though, that the access rights need to granted first: You need to have a suitable business user role to run the embedded analytics.
well, actually there is nothing to activate. The embedded SAC should work out of the box - as long as we are talking about an S/4HANA Cloud tenant.
Without further details I find it hard to comment. This issue should be investigated by our support team. May I ask you to please create a ticket on component LOD-ANA-OEM.
Please share the URL / ID of the tenant that you use and please let us know what exactly are the issues that you encounter: Do you see the new tiles on your Fiori Launchpad/Home screen? What happens when you click on them, do you get an error message?
Hi Rolf thanks for your quick answer really Appreciate.
I suppose that it is a role restriction problem because yes I see all the new tile for example " Manage KPIs and reports but each time i receive the message " it seems your system is not configured for this system"
I also read in the previous posts that "You need to have a suitable business user role to run the embedded analytics." Here do you know which role we should assigned to our Group reporting users ?
the error message "your system is not configured ...." to me is an indication that the embedded SAC has not yet been provisioned completely. So, please, create a ticket to request support.
Regarding the roles: that should really be specified in the S/4HANA Cloud documentation. However, I have been able to run the Group Reporting in our demo systems, so I can share the roles that have been given to me:
Thank you for the wonderful blog. Detailed and informative. Here are few questions, could you please help me to understand.
Full functionality of the SAC in side S/4 HANA cloud. In one of the blogs, I saw that full analytical functionality of SAC is not there in the embedded version. Could you please confirm and could it be possible, what is not available? What are the limitations.
If we wanted to use SAC, isolated, can we still use this scenario, for multisource in S/4 HANA.
Merging the data sets. In Isolated SAC if I wanted to merge 2 data sources, like one coming from SAP and other one like history (Flat file), I could able to combine these 2. Can we do it in embedded SAC version.
Which scenario, I should go to SAC isolated VS SAC embedded inside S/4 HANA cloud.
CDS is must- In S/4 HANA cloud, I can see only the option to select only CDS view as data source. In S/4 HANA cloud embedded, can I use any other source to connect SAC to create the story and dashboards.
How do I combine the data from flat file like history since the SAC in the embedded version can be invoked only through S/4 HANA cloud?
thank you for the kind words. Let me try to answer your questions:
Functionality: SAP Analytics Cloud embedded used the live data access to the data of the embedding application, here SAP S/4 HANA Cloud. There are no limitations for this use case that I am aware of. In the Enterprise version (stand alone) of SAP Analytics Cloud, more use cases are covered. For details please refer to answers for question 5: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/10/24/integrated-analytics-sap-analytics-cloud-now-embedded-in-sap-s4hana...
You cannot bring in additional data to the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud. If you wish to access data sources other than S/4HANA Cloud, e.g. your flat file, you have to go for the Enterprise scenario.
Data access in the embedded scenario means live access to released analytical CDS views exclusively.
The embedded SAP Analytics Cloud is by now part of the S/4HANA Cloud product. It will always be there for you to use. If you wish to opt in for more comprehensive scenarios such as cross-application analytics or planning/prediction/app-building, this requires the Enterprise license. They can co-exist, so you can connect the Enterprise tenant to S/4HANA Cloud and use the live data access and the data replication connection as if the embedded scenario did not exist.
Thanks for the excellent presentation and demo. It would be great to have the "Manage KPIs and Reports" Fiori app available for BW/4HANA queries. "Manage KPIs and Reports" would be a generic tool connecting any InA datasources to SAC. Which SAP group would be responsible for creating this generic version of the "Manage KPIs and Reports" Fiori app? Would it be the Fiori team? The SAC team? Or BW team?
thank you for reaching out. The embedded SAC is based on a live connection, so every feature that requires a data acquisition model is not supported.
The features that you mention require an enterprise SAC.
the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud comes with pre-delivered content based on S/4HANA Cloud analytical CDS Views (links about, see question 8 that holds a link to a more detailed blog).
Customers are free to use the extension concepts and thus create their custom CDS Views and custom stories. However, everything you create in the embedded SAP Analytics Cloud has to be based on live connectivity.