How SAP Predictive Analytics Can Improve Business Performance and Insight

SAP Predictive Analytics is a business intelligence tool form SAP, designed to enable organisations to analyse large amounts of data and predict future events, outcomes and behaviours.

This can help make sense of big data and the Internet of Things by building predictive analytics models to identify unforeseen opportunities, better understand customers and uncover hidden risks. In the process this allows you to reimagine your business for the digital economy, optimise your resources and improve margins across your business.

Automated and Expert Analytics

SAP Predictive Analytics is split into two main tabs, Automated Analytics and Expert Analytics. This effectively combines two previous SAP analytics tools under one interface.

Automated analytics provides data preparation, predictive modelling and scoring, helping businesses analyse data without manual modelling. Algorithms take care of the data preparation and modelling work usually done by data scientists.

Expert analytics is an advanced analysis tool primarily for data scientists that automates manual analysis. Users can analyse and visualise data via pre-built algorithms written in the open-source statistical programming language and then chain the models graphically to perform complex analysis.

The Benefits

Before building a predictive model, analysts must transform data into a format that the analytical engines can process. In the past, this was done by developing scripts and algorithms manually and then applying these to the data. This was often technically difficult, tedious and error-prone. As a result, predictive analytics was performed primarily by highly specialised data scientists.

Like other similar products, SAP Predictive Analytics aims to automate the process and make it easier for business users and data analysts to create predictive models.

SAP Predictive Analytics can help you improve your business performance by utilising and identifying:

• Trends help you understand how your business could evolve in the future.
• Key influencers explain what the underlying reason is of some events (why those customers are engaging).
• Segments provide a categorisation of your customers or products, or other items of interest in a format which you can use to fine tune your business.
• Outliers do the opposite of segments: they tell you what items are very different from the norm and you can use them to see if there are any issues.
• Associations highlight relationships and let you use them in your business.

Working with other SAP programmes

As well as visualising, discovering and sharing untapped opportunities and hidden risks in real time, SAP Predictive Analytics works with SAP’s BusinessObjects platform, in particular the BI and Lumira softwares. Both of these further help support and assess corporate risk and provide real time business insights.

Predictive Analytics also connects with most data types, including spreadsheets, unstructured text files and proprietary files such as SAS and SPSS.

SAP Lumira 2.0

Lumira 2.0 from SAP is a software tool that can be used with SAP Predictive Analytics to further help you asses corporate risk, improve efficiencies, highlight unique data points and confidently identify future opportunities. Lumira 2.0 has recently combined two previous tools, SAP Lumira and SAP Design Studio, under one simplified software.

This convergence means Lumira 2.0 is the only single solution available on the marketplace for both data discovery and data-blending, combined with enterprise, managed dashboarding.

The tool provides many advantages, including seamless end-to-end workflows, single canvas for both visualisation and storyboard authoring and single server side add-on.

To keep up to date with the latest SAP Predictive Analytics and SAP Lumira news, tips and expert insight, sign up as a UKISUG member. Our Special Interest Groups, events and workshops reach across the SAP spectrum and provide the opportunity to learn, network and collaborate with similar SAP users and organisations.