hovitaga data visualizer - overview

5
Hovitaga Data Visualizer Transform plain ALV reports and SAP queries to in- teractive charts, maps and more Connect to SAP Business Warehouse directly and vi- sualize your InfoCubes! Geocode any business data to create interactive maps No additional hardware, software and IT mainte- nance team necessary No programming, no ETL, no field mapping required, can work out of the box Cache the results of reports with long runtime to reduce load on the SAP system Analyze data with your tablet or mobile, even in offline mode without internet connection Create dashboards from multiple data sources to have an overview of your business Reuse your SAP reports, Queries, access SAP tables without any effort Perform OLAP analysis on SAP data directly without any mapping, metadata creation or data replication Get more out of your SAP data

Upload: hovitaga-kft

Post on 29-Jun-2015

439 views

Category:

Technology


5 download

DESCRIPTION

Hovitaga Data Visualizer is a lightweight solution for real-time OLAP analysis and data visualization primarily for SAP systems. It can present data with a pivot grids, maps, charts, gauges, treemaps and lists. Dashboards can be created with drag and drop which may gather data from different systems to give decision makers stunning interfaces to have an overview of key business data at one place. This paper gives an overview of the product.

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Hovitaga Data Visualizer - Overview

Hovitaga Data Visualizer

Transform plain ALV reports and SAP queries to in-teractive charts, maps and more

Connect to SAP Business Warehouse directly and vi-sualize your InfoCubes!

Geocode any business data to create interactive maps

No additional hardware, software and IT mainte-nance team necessary

No programming, no ETL, no field mapping required, can work out of the box

Cache the results of reports with long runtime to reduce load on the SAP system

Analyze data with your tablet or mobile, even in offline mode without internet connection

Create dashboards from multiple data sources to have an overview of your business

Reuse your SAP reports, Queries, access SAP tables without any effort

Perform OLAP analysis on SAP data directly without any mapping, metadata creation or data replication

Get more out of your SAP data

Page 2: Hovitaga Data Visualizer - Overview

Executive overview

Every customer who uses SAP relies on reports. Whether standard ones shipped by SAP or developed specifically for the customer, those are crucial elements of the whole IT solution. Every business process comes down to SAP reports at the end. Business users use reports throughout their daily jobs and decision makers rely on monthly, quarterly and yearly reports. A very common tool besides R/3 reports is SAP Query. It offers the possibility to build reports without ABAP coding, but at the end data is still displayed with a simple list. Almost all reports have a simple list as an output as well, with very basic features. The user interface of SAP Business Warehouse is still based on Microsoft Excel and it does not offer the latest visualiza-tion possibilities.

Our goal was to enhance the presentation of data with the latest tech-nologies available.

The concept is to use the SAP reports, Queries and BW InfoCube queries only to fetch the data to be displayed, and use the state-of-the-art technologies to visual-ize it. The product uses Microsoft Silverlight technology to leverage the best of both worlds: gather the data from SAP and visualize it with Silverlight.

Hovitaga Data Visualizer is a lightweight solution for real-time OLAP analysis and data visualization primarily for SAP systems. It can present data with a pivot grids, maps, charts, gauges, treemaps and lists. Dashboards can be created with drag and drop which may gather data from different systems to give decision makers stunning interfaces to have an overview of key business data at one place.

SAP integration

The most important feature of the software is that no programming effort is required at all in the SAP system. Any SAP Query or report that has the standard structure (selection screen and a list output) can be used immediately, right out of the box. It is also possible to use SAP tables and views directly as data sources. Ho-vitaga Data Visualizer can directly connect to SAP Business Warehouse through its XML for Analysis interface and visualize InfoCube queries.

Every connection needs a SAP user and password to be provided.

Our other product, Hovitaga OpenSQL Editor can be used as a data source to provide a real ad-hoc query solution: simply write and SQL query against the SAP system and immediately visualize it with charts, maps or pivot grid.

No ETL necessary

ETL stands for Extraction, Transformation and Loading, which is the end to end process of gathering all data in the right format for analysis. This is a very compli-cated, high-effort activity that every BI solution needs to accomplish.

Data Visualizer drastically reduces the ETL process almost down to zero. The concept is that every BW InfoCube query, SAP report or query and table already has every necessary metadata stored in SAP. This information is reused so no additional mapping, transformation or customizing is needed. In case of using SAP BW, metadata is automatically read along with the business data. In case of flat data (reports, tables, queries) there is an automatic process of making the flat data multidimensional. Fields are classified as measures or dimensions based on their data dype. This automatic proposal can be overridden, but only needed to be done once since the settings can be saved for each data source.

The only task needed to set up Data Visualizer is to specify which re-ports, queries, tables etc. should be available to the endusers. Default selections and layouts can be published for endusers which can be modified and

Page 3: Hovitaga Data Visualizer - Overview

saved into personal folders.

Easy installation

The second most important feaure of Data Visualizer is that no additional hardware or software is required. The only thing that needs to be installed is the Silverlight runtime, which is for free. This procedure takes only a few minutes. The product runs in an out-of-browser mode which allows offline processing of data also.

Features

Pivot Grid and charts

Data Visualizer can display data with a pivot grid for intuitive OLAP analysis. No technical knowledge is required, simply drag and drop your data to form rows, columns and numbers. Sorting, filtering, grouping and drill-down is quick and easy. A chart can be switched on and off which displays the contents of the pivot grid. It is updated automatically with every action (drill-down, filter etc.). The chart can be customized (type, appearance) to provide the best visualization possible.

Map

Most business data has some sort of geographical meaning. Busi-ness partners, customers have ad-dresses, sales organizations are assigned to geographical territories and so on. Displaying the right data on a map is vital to see correlation between your numbers and geo-graphic positions. Simply drag and drop your data on the map to create heatmaps or to plot shapes on the map. Size, color can be binded to data fields (for ex. total sales determines size, prod-uct group determines shape and revenue determines color), or even piecharts can be drawn to coordi-nates. Data can be aggregated on different levels dynamical-ly (continent, country, state, city, postal code or rooftop), the maps are updated immediately.

Microsoft Bing Maps and Openstreetmap can be used for tile-based maps and any shapefile can be used for heatmaps.

This is possible even if you don’t have coordinates stored in your da-tabase. Simply select the fields that store address data and Data Visu-alizer automatically uses Mi-crosoft Bing Spatial Data Ser-vices to obtain the coordinates for the given address.

Page 4: Hovitaga Data Visualizer - Overview

Treemap

Using treemaps is very effective to gain an overview on a lot of data quick-ly. Treemapping  is a method for displaying  hierarchical  data by using  nest-ed rectangles. The size and color of the rectangles is determined by data fields chosen by the user.

When the color and size dimensions are correlated in some way with the tree structure, one can often easily see patterns that would be difficult to spot in oth-er ways. A second advantage of treemaps is that, by construction, they make efficient use of space. As a result, they can legibly display thousands of items on the screen simultaneously. Treemaps can be created with drag and drop, navigation between levels is easy with simple mouse clicks.

Simple list and chart

Tabular data can be displayed in the conventional list format. The list can be sorted, filtered and grouped with a few clicks. Just like with the pivot grid, a chart can be displayed which visualizes the contents of the list.

Gauges

Summarized information can be visualized perfectly with gauges. The appearance of gauges can be customized and data can be bound to the indicators of the gauges. Gauges are especially effective on dashboards to provide summarized information which is easy to interpret.

Dashboards

Dashboards can be created in seconds: place any number of containers on the screen, position, align and resize them as you wish, and define the con-tent of each container. You can use your previously saved maps, lists, charts, treemaps, pivot grids and gauges to put them in the containers on the dash-board. You can change the dashboard during runtime, hide/show/resize containers etc. Naturally one dashboard can use multiple data sources.

Page 5: Hovitaga Data Visualizer - Overview

Technology

Silverlight is the web-based business technology of Microsoft, with thou-sands of companies relying on it. It is a platform and browser independent technolo-gy with a very easy installation (browser plug-in). It offers a high performance client-side in-memory processing together with new generation interactions (multi-touch etc.). The secure isolated storage can be used to use reports saved locally. Silverlight is natively supported by Windows Phone 7 allowing developers to port their desktop solutions to mobile or tablet platforms with minimal effort.

It is possible to cache report results to reduce load on the SAP system. This can be done at two places: either on the front end (laptop etc.) or on an SQL Server (even in the cloud with the use of Microsoft SQL Azure).

Other data sources

Additionally, Excel files can be used for advanced analytics with Data Visual-izer. To prevent the spreadsheet-emailing chaos, spreadsheets shared with Google Docs can be opened directly from the web to ensure then every user sees the same data.

Additionally, premium data sources can be accessed like the Azure Datamarket via the Open Data Protocol.

The product can access any data source that supports the XML for Analysis interface, including Microsoft Analysis Services, Oracle Essbase, Mondrian, SAS and IBM Infosphere Warehouse Cubing Services.

Benefits

Hovitaga Data Visualizer is designed to provide a self-service BI platform in-stantly usable by non-technical users. Business decision makers do not have to involve the IT department to create new reports anymore.

You can maximize the ROI of previous investments with Data Visualizer by reusing of existing data sources. Every penny invested in the development of SAP reports, queries or InfoCubes will have extra value if the business data is presented in a much more informative way.

The TCO of other BI solutions is usually fairly high. A new server must be purchased with software, which adds extra tasks for the IT staff. The end-users must be trained to be able to use complex software, consultants must be paid to create the data warehouse. Each time a new query is needed, a person with strong technical skills must create it which adds even more to the total costs of the query. Data Visualizer eliminates almost all these expenses with it’s lightweight ar-chitecture, intuitive easy-to-use user interface and finally the lack of need to create a new data warehouse.

The Silverlight platform allows business people to take their analytics wherever they go due to the native support in Windows Phone 7 mobiles and tablets. Every data source can be accessed online or saved reports can be analyzed offline.

Get more value out of your SAP systems with Hovitaga Data Visualizer!

Data Visualizer is still in development.

© Copyright Hovitaga Kft. 2011. All rights reserved. SAP, SAP BW is a registered trademark of SAP AG. Windows Azure, Azure Datamarket, Bing Maps, Bing Spatial Services, IIS, SQL Server, Analysis Services, Silverlight,

Excel, Windows Phone are registered trademarks of Microsoft. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Hovitaga Kft. Address: Lajos utca 93-99 F-3-6, 1036 Budapest, Hungary Phone: +36 20 415 6721

www.hovitaga.com