BUSINESS ONE ANALYTICS
Real-Time Analytics and Reporting for Small Businesses
SAP Business One HANA Analytics
For today’s small business, technology is a key enabler to success. Yet it’s not something that executives like you have time to focus on every day. To help you drive profitable growth and keep countless balls in the air, your company’s information technology must run like a utility. When you turn on your PC, you need to instantly access what you need, much like water from a faucet. This is particularly true when it comes to the reporting and analytics needed to enable better, faster decisions.
You know the frustration – and business consequences – of slow management reporting. Each time you run a query, your analytics software has to find the right data in your back-end database, run calculations, and deliver them to you – a process that can take 30 seconds or longer. The results often lead you to ask additional questions and run deeper queries. Each time you have the same delays, or worse, have to run a special query, which takes even more time. At a certain point, you’re out of time, frustrated, and still need to make the best decision you can with the information and insights available to you. Even with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, you likely can’t access the insight you need instantly – which is what today’s time-pressed executives need. Ever think there has to be a better way? Now there is. Analytics powered by the SAP HANA™ platform are now available for the SAP® Business One application.
Imagine having a world-class ERP solution for small businesses that allows you to generate reports instantly, at the click of a button. Imagine being able to run query after query with no delays – no matter how large your database. And imagine being able to do all this within your ERP application, while providing a streamlined experience for every user – and all at an affordable price point. Then imagine freeing yourself from spending time and money on integrating multiple third-party tools to perform the analysis you need. Now that we’ve integrated analytics with SAP Business One, you can gain the comprehensive reporting and analysis functionality you need in a single solution from one vendor – SAP, a market leader in ERP and business intelligence (BI) software.
Driving Real-Time Business with In-Memory Technology
To meet the analytics requirements of small businesses, we’ve brought together SAP Business One with the power of the SAP HANA platform. SAP HANA enables you to analyze large amounts of data at the speed of thought – giving you instant business insights and the ability to transform your organization into a real-time business. The analytics powered by SAP HANA run behind the scenes of SAP Business One, a single integrated business management application for small businesses that supports all core business functions across your entire company. This means all of the transactional and operational information within your SAP Business One application is available for instant insight. You can see your business as it exists right now – not as it existed when you did your custom data extract, which was the case with previous generations of analytics and reporting technology. As a result, users at all levels can make better decisions faster because they have real-time access to information – along with the ability to explore and investigate more information before making those decisions.
For example, people can run simulations or “what-if” scenarios instantly, as well as access fast-running reports and dashboards that leverage the SAP HANA database. In addition, they can access all your data in SAP Business One with freestyle enterprise search and query large amounts of data instantly. This means they can utilize more complete information for more accurate insight. Equally important, this solution can help increase productivity by putting users in control of information. For instance, they can create and run ad hoc reports without IT assistance and use the Microsoft Excel interface to explore and report on data – all from within SAP Business One. You benefit from empowered employees, lower operational and IT costs, and faster information processing.
Run Your Business Based on Trusted, Real-Time Insight
SAP HANA is a breakthrough technology that accelerates analytics many times faster than traditional tools, giving you the ability to instantly generate reports and answer questions as quickly as you can ask them. We’ve organized data in a special way that leverages a separate server for the in-memory computing engine for SAP HANA in order to reduce the analytical workload on the server running SAP Business One. This facilitates fast data search, access, and reporting. What’s more, there are constant updates between the two servers.
For example, the SAP Crystal Reports® software and prebuilt dashboards and reports that come with SAP Business One are vastly accelerated for real-time insight. Plus, when you invest in this solution, we provide additional dashboards to help you flex your reporting muscle. These dashboards cover sales opportunities, inventory turnover analysis, delivery analysis, service calls, purchase order quotations, and more.
Perform Multidimensional Analysis Without IT Assistance
With analytics powered by SAP HANA, SAP Business One eliminates the need to waste days waiting for IT or a consultant to prepare and consolidate data from hundreds of forms, databases, and spreadsheets. All users familiar with the Microsoft Excel Pivot Table can use spreadsheets to run their own analyses on live data and create ad hoc reports in minutes. Spreadsheets can be plugged into the in-memory computing engine’s server – without IT assistance.
With the click of a button, you can open a spreadsheet and instantly populate it with live data in SAP Business One. If any data changes in SAP Business One, it changes in your spreadsheet. Armed with a custom “window” into your business, people are empowered to make decisions much faster and with greater confidence.
Find Relevant Business Information in Seconds
Sometimes the biggest challenge is simply finding the information you need to base a decision upon – and then verifying that what you’ve found is trustworthy data. But with the analytics now available in SAP Business One, trusted data is always ready and waiting. Using a Google-like, freestyle search, you can instantly find and access all relevant business information – including transactional details. With comprehensive visibility into current and complete business information, you can:
- Search for anything and everything in your SAP Business One application
- Analyze highly granular data to discover new insights
- Explore and investigate more information than ever before when making decisions
Keep IT Simpler and Easier to Manage
For most small businesses, keeping IT effective but simple to manage is a priority, as they don’t often have the IT resources to deploy and maintain complex analytics software. One of the benefits of this solution is that there’s no longer a need for third-party analytics software that complicates your IT landscape.
You can deploy it without any disruption of normal business activities. And once implemented your ERP, analytics, and reporting software comes from one software vendor – SAP. All functionality is available through the familiar interface to SAP Business One, so no end-user training is required to get everyone leveraging the power of real-time analytics and reporting.