Data Discovery Software

SAP's BI roadmap with its numerous forks and loops is difficult to understand even for SAP experts. Even the decision in favor of a user interface and BI tool for the business departments is a complex task.

The fact is that business departments rarely have an understanding of SAP culture and ultimately want to solve their BI tasks efficiently. One savior in the Big Data distress is Qlik: The company has three offerings for the SAP community:

• First, a contemporary and intuitive user interface that can be mastered by means of minimal learning effort;
• secondly, a valid SAP interface that is also accepted by SAP Basis in almost all cases,
• and thirdly, a mature, autonomous BI engine that is precisely tailored to the SAP community.

Accordingly, the Qlik scenario in an SAP network is well suited for "data discovery" because it offers both spontaneous analyses and repeated, periodic reporting.

Qlik enables SAP legacy customers to perform visually appealing ad hoc analytics for data discovery from an ERP system and external sources. Qlik's SAP-certified interfaces enable users to add user-driven analytics to their SAP ERP, BW and Hana applications.

Evaluations of data by the Qlik Data Concierge complement SAP BEx. The data is loaded from the BW system into the in-memory cache of the Qlik Sense server, which makes the application scalable:

Even many thousands of users can work quickly in parallel. Hana as the underpinning for BW further increases query performance. Since 2016, Qlik Sense has been certified for Hana as part of the SAP Application Development Program.

The digital transformation continues to have an extremely positive impact on the market for business intelligence and business analytics. The reason for this is not least the exponential growth in mass data associated with it, such as through the Internet of Things (IoT).

Manufacturers of business intelligence and business analytics benefit from and are challenged by this development, Lünendonk reported in "The Market for Business Intelligence and Business Analytics in Germany".

Qlik is one of the market leaders due to its strong positioning and extensive SAP knowledge:

"Expectations of vendor companies are not unfounded"

knows Mario Zillmann, partner at Lünendonk and Hossenfelder and author of the study.

"For example, the rapid increase in mass data through social media, IoT, sensors and the digitization of the supply chain is creating a high demand to be able to analyze and use it.

After all, those who manage to generate as much central data as possible and use it to offer new digital products and services for existing and potential customers can set themselves apart from the competition."

Qlik is a provider of a visual analytics platform and a pioneer in user-driven business intelligence. The product portfolio includes both cloud-based and locally installed solutions and ranges from reporting and self-service visual analytics to guided and embedded analytics for customer-specific analyses.

With Qlik Sense, QlikView, and Qlik Cloud, no matter where the data comes from or where it is stored, users can explore the relationships between the data, which in turn lead to valuable insights and good ideas.

The Swiss industrial group Sulzer AG found in Qlik a strategic BI front end for data visualization and descriptive analytics. The implementation of QlikView resulted in a deployment of 45 global applications for about 1000 employees based on data from about 15 IT systems.

The focus is on sales, finance, procurement and project management. The visualization of the monthly, semi-annual and annual financial statements based on the consolidated figures from SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) across all company units was started.

The software was particularly convincing due to its patented in-memory technology: data from almost all common formats are linked in the working memory. Data access is correspondingly fast.

The task was to complement the existing SAP BW and Microsoft SQL BI landscape with a strategic BI front end that would enable the rapid integration and analysis of data from different sources and could be used directly in the business departments in an uncomplicated manner.

"We were looking for - and found with QlikView - a solution with which all potential sources of analytical insights can be integrated in a performant and reliable manner, flexibly evaluated and distributed in a recipient-oriented manner.

QlikView enables us to bring consolidated information in the right format to the right person from line of business to middle to top management - from the big picture down to the transaction level where operational and strategic decisions need to be made to optimize processes across the value chain"

explained Steffen Lange, Head of BI at Sulzer.

Further use cases are also currently emerging in the area of evaluation of machine-generated data, in line with Industry 4.0 and IoT.

Unanswered for the entire SAP community and unfortunately also from Qlik is the license topic "indirect use". There are no conclusive findings here yet, because even at the DSAG Annual Congress 2017 in Bremen, SAP and the user association had to admit: the topic is still being worked on.

From the point of view of existing customers, it would probably be desirable if SAP, DSAG and partners such as Qlik were to engage more intensively in this area, because the solutions are perfectly suitable from a technical and organizational point of view.