Using SAP S/4HANA Reporting Options

SAP S/4HANA Embedded Analytics blends transactions and analytics allowing operational reporting on live transactional data.

The SAP S/4HANA for Analytics roadmap shows three types of users. Depending on the role inside a company, a user falls into one of the following user role categories:

• The IT user who develops CDS views, new apps, and planning functions.

• The Analytics key user who creates and maintains queries, predefined reports, KPIs, dashboards and tiles, and enables the end users to find the right reports.

• The Analytics end user who works with different analytical tools to consume the data, perform analysis, and act accordingly.

With SAP S/4HANA, this concept is supported by SAP Core Data Services (CDS) views for real-time operational reporting. The content is represented as a Virtual Data Model (VDM), which is based on the transactional and master data tables of SAP S/4HANA. CDS views are developed, maintained, and extended in the ABAP layer of the SAP S/4HANA system. The system generates SQL-Runtime-Views in SAP HANA to execute the data read and transformation inside the SAP HANA database layer.

In SAP S/4HANA, you can also create financial statements using the SAP Fiori app Balance Sheet / Income Statement - Multidimensional. With this app, you can display balance sheets and profit and loss statements using operational, local, and global charts of accounts. From this report, you can also navigate to the line items of a specific G/L account, or customer or supplier line items. Export to Microsoft Excel or PDF is also supported.

SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is a solution on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform and allows visualization, planning, and prediction in a secure cloud-based environment. SAC is a self service business analytics tool.

SAC creates data models and analyzes the current situation, checks the possible causes, and designs scenarios of the future. Doing this, SAC integrates Business Intelligence Predictive and Planning Functions.

The idea of SAC is to offer all analytical functions in one product to the end user, the decision maker, and IT departments. SAC offers real-time analysis, planning, and forecasts in one application. Doing so, SAC is a BI tool with complete functionality, which can work independently from other SAP applications.

Users can refer to data from several internal and external sources, execute planning that contains predictive modeling elements, and can visualize this with the same tool. Having access to a lot of data from different sources, the user gets both a consolidated and real-life view of their "world".

With the help of the SAC planning functionality, financial plans and operating plans can be set up on one platform and be linked, to come to improved decisions.

Predictive Analytics:

• Machine Learning offers new information during analysis.

• Complex scenarios about the future can be modeled and used for getting to a decision.

All important application data is stored on the SAP HANA database of the company. Functionality like BI, Planning, and Predictive Analytics are stored in the cloud. SAC can be seen as an analytical engine in SAP HANA.

The Analytics Cloud Software is completely installed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), hosted and maintained, and updated by SAP itself in its own data centers.

If a company uses SAP HANA On-Premise:

• SAC is called using a browser.

• Access to company data takes place using a reverse proxy.

• Doing so, the data remains in the company and does not exit the browser.

Non-SAP-HANA companies:

• Data is replicated in the cloud.

• Data leaves the corporate network.

For Financial Reporting, SAC Business Content (Stories and a Digital Boardroom) is delivered. This content is built based on SAP S/4HANA On Premise Live Connectivity.

The CDS view that exposes the financial KPIs uses semantic tags for defining the KPIs.

As an analysis layer of the SAP Business Technology Platform, SAC supports the operational reporting of the entire company. The interaction between SAP SAC and SAP S/4HANA makes it possible to perform real-time data analyzes directly on Core Data Services (CDS). With a large number of access options to different data, users get a quick overview of the operational data in the SAP system.

The Digital Boardroom shows the Company’s financial situation real-time for the current and previous year and provides FI KPIs in different topics based on the classification of Growth, Profitability, and Liquidity.

This content can be plugged in to a S/4HANA system to display content out-of-the-box.