Today SAP builds on its social software strategy with a key milestone: game-changing innovations that help you effectively collaborate and make data-driven decisions to produce results. You can transform your business processes with the inclusion of fast, easy-to-use, and powerful data analytics. Inform your business communications, decisions and strategies like never before with the context you get from social capabilities coupled with business analytics.
In delivering on this vision, this new release of SAP StreamWork adds analytics capabilities directly into where you are collaborating. You can easily work with data to find important trends and other information that guide the decisions and strategies that you implement. You can create interactive visualizations and share them across your organization with the option of using social collaboration tools like pro-con tables, rankings, quick polls, and checklists. Follow the links below or read on to see how you can:
- Easily manipulate data to find pertinent information
- Quickly inform others of key findings by sharing visualizations
- Spend less time searching and more time analyzing
- Stay informed on the performance of key metrics
See collaborative analytics in action: Resolve a sales slippage issue
Imagine that you are a global sales leader and you have recently been informed that sales in Latin/South America are declining. You know that SAP StreamWork has everything built in to collaborate and analyze the pertinent data to find a solution, so that is where you begin.
First, you want to review sales in Latin/South America by quarter and city to see how the sales figures look and identify trends. You know you can retrieve your data from SAP HANA in the cloud, which is now integrated with SAP StreamWork. You pull your sales history from the last year into SAP StreamWork.
Once you have selected the needed sales data, you sort, filter, and target the exact cities in question, and graph them to compare.
Exploring the data this way, you can easily see that the sales declined dramatically in Medelin. So you were able to pinpoint the specific city that is causing the overall decline. After you are finished analyzing the data, you save your visualization to your personal workspace.
Your next stop is to figure out if this is a sales pipeline issue. Are there sales that didn’t close when they needed to close? Or do you need more marketing focus on this city to increase leads and pipeline? Or both? To figure that out, you go into SAP CRM to see whether there are any sales opportunities in this city. You see that there is a pipeline and notice an extremely large sales opportunity with Allmuby that could help greatly this quarter to bring things back. But the opportunity needs focus, so you create an SAP StreamWork activity directly from the SAP CRM opportunity to gather the right salespeople in order to analyze the data, collaborate, and close this huge deal.
In order to give your team more context as to why sales in Latin/South America have declined, what's causing the issue, and why this opportunity is important to close, you add the visualization of the sales history that you created to the activity by copying it from your "My Items" workspace.
To strategize and get the right people in on closing the deal, you add in a discussion to the activity. Your participants add comments to the sales visualization that you created.
In addition to focusing on Allmubuy, you'd also like to get the team focused on the top opportunities in Latin/South America. To get an idea of where the best sales opportunities are, you bring in your pipeline data via a spreadsheet and visualize the opportunity size of each of your customers.
You would like your team to get started on prioritizing the deals, so you import the data into a ranking tool and have the team rank the deals in order of priority and likelihood of closing.
Once the team ranks the opportunities, you have agreement on the top three opportunities to focus on for the quarter. You document the top opportunities in a decision tool so that everyone is on the same page and knows where to focus their efforts.
While this is only one example of how you can use analytics when collaborating to drive decisions, you could have continued this conversation to brainstorm and analyze which marketing and sales programs you might use in Medelin to further increase pipeline and revenue.
Easily manipulate data to find pertinent information
Gain insights from the trends in your data and clearly show collaborators the metrics most important to your business goals. You can use the data exploration tool to quickly select, pivot, filter, and sort your data through visualizations in both summarized and aggregated views.
Get access to your data faster when using the enterprise edition of SAP StreamWork by being able to directly connect to your SAP HANA database to load datasets.
Quickly inform others of key findings by sharing visualizations
Distribute the impression of data you get from analytics tools faster by saving your exploration view as a visualization item. Many different chart types are supported to fit your needs, and there is a simple tabular format as well.
- Bar Chart to compare different values
- Scatter Chart to examine the correlation between data points
- Line Chart to analyze trends in your data
- Stacked Bar Chart to compare the contribution of different categories overall or as a percentage
- Pie chart to compare the contribution of different categories that comprise an entity
Visualizations help demonstrate relationships and trends within data to participants in your activities. You and your team can easily integrate data relevant to best business practices with a wide variety of collaborative functionality. When interacting with visualization items in activities, you and your team can comment, change chart types, and further explore data with the click of a button.
Never have your data altered without knowing - it's simple to keep track of how the data, visualization, or comments were altered at any point in time with the built-in versioning system.
Spend less time searching and more time analyzing
To make it even easier to drill down and focus on data analysis, we have created an easy way for you to create tools from data points in visualizations. You can create a new Pro/Con Table, Ranking, Quick Poll or CheckList tool directly from a visualization in an activity by using the menu underneath the item title.
Get more utility out of existing business intelligence artifacts by increasing their visibility and seamlessly delivering their content. Now you can add Crystal Reports files to activities, and they will appear within their own viewer with the option to explore the data.
Stay informed on the performance of key metrics
You can easily track the performance of business-critical metrics by adding visual alerts to your SAP StreamWork charts that are connected to live or static datasets. You can set specific numeric thresholds to indicate major changes in your most important business metrics. For example, if you are concerned about countries where sales were occasionally dipping below $550,000 US, you can define a visual alert and associate a color with this threshold, making it obvious when key figures are not performing as expected.
More features to help you work smarter with your team
If you would like to find out more about how the latest release of SAP StreamWork helps you collaborate to get work done, please see the blog post, What’s new: Get work done faster with personal workspaces and more collaboration options, which outlines how you can:
- Work - on your own terms with your personal workspace
- Easily connect the right contributors
- Quickly turn ideas into results
- Get everyone on the same page to work smarter
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