Working with SAP Lumira – Part 1

[shankarsgs]

SAP Lumira is a new Offering from SAP for Data Visualization and Dashboard building. It is integrated with SAP Lumira cloud to share the Dashboards built. Currently the version is 1.15 and available in free personal edition or the paid professional version. It has both client and server versions.

Downloading the client

A free trail of SAP Lumira client can be download from here. You would need SAP.com profile for that, if you don’t you can create one for free. You will get SAPLumirainstall.exe a compressed archive.

Installation the client

Installing the client is just usual routine of any other software installation. The wizard on completion will install SAP Lumira client.

Building a Dashboard

Lumira has the concept of storyboards, where each of the Dashboards tells a story in Visual format. Building a storyboard has the following phases.

Prepare - The prepare phase is the first phase where the Data source is selected. The data from the Dataset is parsed into Lumira and can be cleansed as necessary. The Data can be from Excel files, CSV formats, HANA One cloud, SAP BO or from SQL Server.

The CSV file that consists of Stock data for TESLA is selected for this Dashboard.

Lumira is intelligent to parse the Data and present the list of columns that are need. A basic level of Data cleansing can be done here.

Further cleansing can be done by splitting,and trimming of Data in the column or by applying a formulae to create a new Dimension. Data can be merged from two sources and there should be one common column in both.

Visualize – Visualize is the second phase where the visual charts are build. Lumira lists the Measures and Dimensions on the left that can be used in the chart and the chart types and properties on the right.

New visualization with different measures and dimensions can be created and those appear below the main content pane

Compose – Compose phase is where the actual storyboard is composed. It has all the objects created in the previous steps along with filters, heading, style and customization. Everything around is drag and drop and multiple stories can be created. The attributes for the board can be defined at the right side pane.

Share – Share is the final phase where the newly created storyboards can be published. There are various publishing options. Storyboards can be published to Lumira cloud where it can be shared, to Lumira on premise server or SAP Streamwork. Datasets can be exported to Excel or CSV or to Lumira cloud.