In this lesson, you will explore the two key innovations of SAP Business Data Cloud: data products and intelligent applications.
Focusing on Data Products and Intelligent Applications
Objective
After completing this lesson, you will be able to outline the technology behind SAP Business Data Cloud.
Introduction
Data Products
Data Products
Let's begin by focusing on data products.
To recap, data products are at the heart of SAP Business Data Cloud. They are the individual building blocks of the data platform and consist of curated business data and associated metadata that has been replicated and harmonized from SAP applications. SAP manages all aspects of the replication from source system to SAP Business Data Cloud.
Data products are discovered using the SAP Business Data Cloud cockpit.
An example of a data product is Sales Order. This data product includes all the fields that relate to a sales order, such as transaction id, customer, delivery date, material ordered, quantity, and so on. SAP ensures that all fields that are needed to get a complete picture of a sales order are included in the data product.
In addition to the business data, a data product also provides the associated technical and business metadata. The metadata is very important because it provides the semantics of the data that describe its purpose, and the rules for how it should be handled. For a sales order field such as material, which is identified only by a meaningless material id, the metadata might include the description of the material in various languages, the type of material, the supplier of the material, and the currency used to value the material. Metadata provides the semantics that are required to understand the relationships between entities. For example, the metadata would tell us that a material is associated with a supplier, and also associated to a warehouse.
As well as business data and metadata, the data product also provides a technical and business description of the data product so that it can be evaluated before installation, by the business user.
Note
It might be helpful to compare a data product with an InfoObject in SAP BW. The basic principles are quite similar in that an InfoObject provides not just business data but also the essential metadata. However, the SAP BW InfoObject does not provided information to support discovery. Also, an InfoObject is not managed by SAP, so this means the customer must work through all the steps to put it into production.
Data products arrive in SAP Business Data Cloud in a basic form containing only the essential data for a business entity. Within SAP Business Data Cloud the basic data products are combined with other basic data products to form derived data products. These derived data products provide broader scope of data that is more useful to a business user. There can be even more layers on top to combine the derived data products to generate more enriched data products ready for consumption.
SAP has already developed hundreds of data products that combine data from SAP applications and more are being developed so that eventually there will be data products covering all SAP applications.
The data products delivered by SAP are called SAP-managed data products. Customers can create their own data products. These are called customer-managed data products. Partners also play an important role in developing industry-based data products. These are partner-managed data products.
Data products are grouped by Data Packages to make it easy to discover them and to activate them. You do not activate an individual data product.
Data products are combined to create data models that generate useful data sets ready for analysis. Data products are highly reusable and carry only the very raw information. Developers and business users can put their trust in data products to always provide accurate and up-to-date information.
Intelligent Appplications
Intelligent Applications
Let's focus on intelligent applications.
An intelligent application technically consists of multiple, related objects that can be described using a stack:
- Data Products: The foundation of the intelligent application is business data from the related source systems. As part of the installation process of an intelligent application, the dependent data products are automatically installed in SAP Business Data Cloud. The business data is immediately replicated from the source systems to SAP Business Data Cloud ready to be consumed by the next layer in the intelligent application stack.
- Data Models: On top of the data products, data model artifacts are generated. The artifacts include tables, views and data flows. The purpose of the data model is to combine the data products to generate meaningful data sets, add formulas, currency conversions, and to add extra analytical capabilities such as hierarchies to support drill-down by the business user.. The data models are consumed by the top layer of the intelligent application stack.
- Dashboards: The top layer of your intelligent application stack is the analytical dashboard. A dashboard provides the business user with visualization tools so that they can explore the data. The dashboard can support BI use-cases including planning. The dashboard includes an AI-driven co-pilot to support natural language querying.
Once the Intelligent Application is installed, all operational activities, such as continuous data replication, are automatically taken care of by SAP. You do not need to set up data loading schedules.
Examples of Intelligent Applications
Working Capital Insights
Working Capital Insights is an intelligent application delivered and managed by SAP to provide insights into all aspects of working capital of an organization. The data is sourced from SAP S/4HANA.
It includes:
- Overview of working capital : provides a clear snapshot of key financial metrics that reflect the company’s working capital and resource efficiency. It combines essential data points to give a comprehensive view of financial health and liquidity, highlighting relationships between capital, sales, and cash flow. This page helps quickly assess performance and identify areas for improvement, supporting strategic decision-making.
- Liquidity & Cash: offers a detailed view of the company’s cash position and liquidity management. It focuses on key metrics that assess the effectiveness of cash flow generation, the company’s ability to meet short-term obligations, and overall financial stability. By examining various ratios and asset values, this page enables users to evaluate the company’s cash health and liquidity position, supporting informed decisions about capital allocation, risk management, and financial planning.
- Accounts Receivable: provides insights into the company’s receivables management and collection efficiency. It highlights key metrics that measure the average time taken to collect outstanding sales and the status of overdue versus future receivables. The page also breaks down outstanding receivables based on the Net Due Arrears Days, offering a clearer view of the aging of receivables.
- Accounts Payable: offers a comprehensive view of the company’s payables management and payment efficiency. It includes key metrics such as the average time to settle payables (DPO) and a breakdown of payables based on Net Due Arrears Days. The page also provides insights into realized discounts, utilization rate, and on-time payment rate, helping users assess the company’s ability to optimize payment terms, manage supplier relationships, and enhance cash flow management.
- Inventory: provides an analysis of the company’s inventory management and efficiency. It includes key metrics such as Days Inventory Outstanding (DIO), inventory turnover ratio, gross margin, and average inventory. These insights help users evaluate how effectively inventory is managed, identify potential inefficiencies, and assess the impact of inventory on profitability and cash flow. This page supports decision-making around inventory levels, stock rotation, and cost optimization.
For a deeper dive on Working Capital Insights, checkout the documentation where you will also find installation and setup instructions.
People Intelligence
People Intelligence is a collection of intelligent applications delivered and managed by SAP to provide insights into human capital management. The data is sourced from SAP SuccessFactors.
It includes:
- Workforce Composition
- Gain organizational insight: understand the composition of the workforce by role, organization, location, org structure a common demographic attributes.
- Monitor employment shifts: analyze talent flow to understand movement across roles, departments, and regions.
- Skills Insights
- Evaluate core expertise: identify existing skill strengths to pinpoint critical gaps and suggest potential development strategies and opportunities.
- Strengthen future readiness: align workforce capabilities with organizational priorities to help ensure readiness for future challenges.
- Measure growth potential: compare current skills to target proficiency levels needed to achieve business goals.
- Compensation
- Visualize pay equity: evaluate pay levels by visualizing the compa-ratio.
- Assess pay trends: understand the average annual salary of the workforce by role, organization, location, grade and common demographic attributes.
- Strengthen compensation strategies: optimize compensation structures to attract top talent and retain high performers.
For a deeper dive on People Intelligence, checkout the documentation where you will also find installation and setup instructions.
These are just two examples of SAP provided intelligent applications. More are available, and SAP continually develop and release intelligent applications from all SAP line of business (LoB) applications.
The Data Journey
Journey of Data
Watch this video to explore the journey of data during the installation of an Intelligent Application:
In the next video, you will explore a scenario that demonstrates the customization possibilities of SAP Business Data Cloud. You will see how to combine third-party data and data from SAP BW.
Let's Summarize What You've Learned
In this lesson, you discovered two key innovations behind SAP Business Data Cloud.
At the heart of SAP Business Data Cloud are data products which are curated, harmonized building blocks of data to develop advanced analytics.
Intelligent Applications automatically install the required data products, automate data replication, harmonization, and generate analytical dashboards.