oliver.mainka

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    I (working in SAP's Office of the CTO) just started to do some research on the topic of measuring which functions in an SAP system users use. That could be done at various levels of granularity (probably the best would be which transactions and what reports are used by how many users how often, maybe also by type of user) and would greatly benefit from some good canned analytics (e.g. usage patterns over time and along business processes, high/low lists of what is used often in the system).

    Sure, there are transactions like STAD and ST03, but these are not for a business manager who wants to determine whether crucial SAP functionality is broadly used or not (and what to do to get users actually use it).

    My questions to you are:

    1) Do you do usage analysis in your system?
    2) What tool(s) do you use for this?
    3) What benefits do you derive from doing usage tracking, or which do you wish you could achieve?

    Thanks for your thoughts,
    Oliver

    Sure, everybody wishes their system would be faster, but there are those long-running processes which we kick off and look at their result later. Either we have a coffee in between (and forget about our business question in between) or wait until "tomorrow". Examples are probably a dunning run or an MRP run.

    Now, imagine that any such processes would run say a hundred times faster. Instead of waiting 2 minutes you would get a result in 10 seconds. Instead of waiting 2 hours you would wait 10 minutes.

    Would that make any difference to you or your business users?

     

    Here are my questions to you:

    1) What are those long-running transactions / business processes which you wish would be shorter?

    2) If it were 100 times faster, would that make an actual difference in running your business? Could you do things much better than before? Would you do them differently?

     

    Thanks for your thoughts,

    Oliver (from SAP's Office of the CTO)

    Business Objects Polestar is a tool for the Business User who needs to sift through a lot of data and needs more than a dashboard, but is not an analyst who would deal with a more complicated user interface. It looks like this:

     

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    You can pick from the available numeric metrics (here: sales revenue), which are already pre-aggregated along the different "facets" (by year, by quarter, by state). You can sort the facets. You can click on an entry and all data will be filtered by that value (e.g. click on Q3 and values will only be for Q3). Can't find what you are looking for? You can use a search field to find "jewelry sales in 2005 for California" and it will propose the right facets and most likely values you are looking for.

    At the bottom you see the charts (Polestar finds the best for your current research) and a little data table to only show "top n" values.

    There are a few more features, but by and large that is the idea... and every click gets a response in a second. Actually, SAP coupled Polestar with the BI Accelerator and you can wade through a billion source data records and still get a one second reply for each action. This tool invites business people to explore left and right and up and down, click click click, because it has a simple UI and is fast.

    Naturally, people started to ask for showing the data on maps as well. So in the Office of the CTO we built a little prototype and now you can see your data by geographic area...

     

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    ... and also use differently sized circles instead of colors ...

     

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    ... and if you want to show a breakdown of the data by another dimension (e.g. revenue by state and by quarter for that state) we can show a little chart:

     

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    This can be used for sales analyses, marketing analyses, warranty analyses, market segmentation, territory management ... It is not a full-blown Geographic Information System (GIS), but offers value in its simplicity.

    At Where 2.0 in San Jose Google today announced a new feature, which adds another level of data (and fun) to Google Maps. For all of you who have done mashups between SAP data and Google Maps there is more to play with...    Here is how it works.  At the view buttons at the top right of the map you now have a new one, "Street View". Once you choose it (and you are zoomed in close enough) you see the streets that the images are available for (today just for a few cities in the US, I am sure it will rapidly increase) in blue:  image  As you zoom in you can see the streets in more detail, and you can place a person icon for the street view:  image  Click on a street to place the person and to open the street view bubble. It shows you the image and the line in the middle helping to you orient yourself what you are looking at. Also note that the person icon now has an arrow showing which direction you are looking at (here downtown Palo Alto):  image  With the up/down arrow keys you move forward and backward along the line, and with the left/right arrow keys you get a seamless 360 degree view of the location... this is A9 on steroids! So looking to the right you get one of my favourite breakfast spots:  image  With the + and - keys you can zoom in in a few steps:  image  You can also select "Full Screen" in the bubble to enlarge the image:  image  If you are at a point where one or more streets cross (like here in the San Francisco Marina district) you get all other street centerlines and can "drive" onto another street:  image  And here is a fun "application" of this. Say you know you will visit the San Francisco Embarcadero you can drive up and down and see where they have parking...  image  ... and you can actually zoom in to see the signs giving you the price ;-)  image
    Two days ago I showed you the fundrace.org maps, containing the campaign contribution data... and I could not help to look at the election results maps from yesterday at major newspaper sites, to check which I found most informative. Here is a rundown...  Bad UI This map does not really add any information by being sort-of three-dimensional and tilted. And when you hover over a state the "data sheet" covers what else may be behind. image Too much detail This map is the main one, and it is shown by county. Too much detail... image Wrong information Here the main map shows what seats are up for election, but it did not give me the results. image Gradation Now here is more information, showing a gradation of support for each party... but what is strong/weak/barely? image The Winner: New York Times And here is the one I liked best. Asthetic colors, minimal lines, and the right information... Who kept their senate seats, who toppled the opponentimageFor the senate, relating the votes to how many people are represented by the senatorimageFor the House, a grid showing the districtsimage
    One of the powers of using geospatial software is that large volumes of data which do not make much sense in tabular form can deliver unique insights when plotted on a map. Which large volumes of SAP data could be plotted on a map? What are your ideas?  Very timely for Election Day here is an example which I saw now already a year and a half ago at Where 2.0 in San Francisco, and it is from the last presidential election... but still as valid as ever.  This series of maps and other screenshots shows a visualization of campaign contribution data from the U.S. For non-U.S. citizens it may seem that campaign contributions are a very private matter, but here it is indeed public data!   Firstly there is an U.S. overview map. You see campaign contributions (looks like by three-digit ZIP code). The larger metropolitan areas have been broken down by party in a pie chart.  image Zoom to San Francisco, a largely democratic city. Why are there these big red spots on the top right? The largest circle is the headquarter of Goldmann-Sachs, an investment firm. Employees there (or the company) used the company address to make their contribution. You also see the horizontal strip of republican contributions near the water, which are more affluent areas.  imageimage The last two screens show data "around me" at an address in S.F.: who do my neighbors give money too? And then there was the joke to make this app available on a GPS-enabled handheld device... and if you are in S.F. you could check what kind of neighborhood you are in, and say if you are a republican in a strong democratic neighborhood, seek the fastest path out of there to "friendly" territory. imageimage The source for this is at http://www.fundrace.org/

    We started a project at SAP dubbed Sagres (we want to show the world how to make better use of geography, as good old Prince Henry the Navigator did). It is about an evaluation where and how we should increase the integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (think: ESRI and the other large GIS vendors like GE Energy, Intergraph, Autodesk, or MapInfo), other geospatial software (think: Google or Yahoo Maps, or Microsoft Virtual Earth), or Location-Based Services (LBS) (think: locate a cell phone) within the SAP suite. While we have several existing integrations points (e.g. the capability to show objects and areas on maps in BW, or to show the routing of trucks in Transportation Planning Vehicle Scheduling, to name just two (see below)), there are probably many, many more opportunities. If you are into GIS or LBS, you may enjoy to join us on this ride!!! While some postings will be about SAP, others will be just about intersting things we saw in the GIS/LBS world. As a warm-up, here is what BW Maps look like, in four examples. The way this works is that BW customers get a voucher for ESRI ArcView which they can use to "geocode" their data, and also get a sample set of free maps. The SAP Internet Graphic Server does all the rendering of the final map. 1) You can take any key figures in BW and map them onto an area (here revenue by state), and show business objects and size them by a key figure (here locatiosn of customers and their revenues). You can hover over one with your mouse and get the excat value. image 2) You can show the data broken down by an additional characteristic as a pie or bar chart on the map. Here the revenue by product category is shown, per state. The pies vary in size according to the total. You can also see how the mouse-over works for an area as well. image 3) You can do a drill-down into the the location characteristic by clicking on the south-west region on the map above and then get the data for the next lower zoom level (here by state): image 4) And last but not least, using the BW Web Application Designer, you can combine a map element with other charts. If you click on the different sales regions on the map the other charts update automatically. image And here is the example from TPVS, where the map gets shown in an area on the SAPgui. Here the Internet Graphic Server gets the map from an external map provider. image In project Sagres we are thinking of much more interactive maps, and of making more use of the powerful features of GIS servers and GIS web services. Here are some examples: 1) A citizen enters a service request for a broken hydrant directly onto the map. The map comes from the GIS and is mashed up in this Composite with SAP screens for collecting the repair information. And the application then triggers SAP to create a service request (calling it via SAP XI) and triggers the GIS to draw that hydrant with a red ring (so that other citizens can see that someone else already requested a repair). And the data with all the hydrant details? It is synchronized between the two systems using SAP MDM! image 2) A city supervisor wants to see where how many repairs have happened. We retrieve the data from BW and sure, we could just draw each asset using different colors. But instead we use further GIS visualization algorithms to further aggregate the data using a grid overlay, or draw hull curves showing where 40%, 60%, and 80% of all repairs were. Imagine to see this "blob" move over the map when you show this quarter-by-quarter for the last three years... it will move towards were more and more repairs in the city are due, e.g. in the direction of where new subdivisions were put in place 10 years ago. image image What are your ideas for meaningful, interesting, innovative SAP/GIS mashups?

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