SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA delivers more than just raw speed

SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA delivers more than just raw speed

Everyone remembers the iconic quote from Tony Scott’s iconic 80’s film Top Gun, that rocketed Tom Cruise to stardom when Maverick (Tom Cruise) and Goose (Anthony Edwards) high five each other and say those words “I feel the need…the need…for SPEED!” and its  most likely one of the things that most ERP software users would also feel from time to time.

And its certainly one of the major benefits that SAP HANA delivers to any solution that’s built on this revolutionary new technology based on the concept of in memory computing where your ERP data is compressed and held in main computer memory or RAM which delivers huge performance enhancements in areas like reporting, dashboard generation and interactive analysis using Excel Pivot tables to work with massive amounts of data to generate insights in to the business in record time or as Hasso Plattner says – real, Real Time.

SAP Business One now takes advantage of the power of this new in memory technology with its latest product from the development team that is built on SAP HANA – with the incredibly long name of SAP Business One Analytics powered by SAP HANA.

The solution not only delivers reports in record time, dashboards based on huge data sets updated in real time but is now delivering the ability for small and midsize businesses to re-engineer some of their most complex business processes and build new business processes that give them a competitive edge in the market.

Lets take a look at just of a few of the examples of SAP Business One customers utilizing this new technology and see what they have to say about it….

Take Nashua Communications (South Africa) an Information and Communications Technology company with  500 employees and 286 SAP Business One users – we asked them for their feedback on the solution and their experience and here’s some of the things they talked about –

  • The enterprise search is fantastic! Users can now find any relevant data or transactional information based on a „Google‟ like search very quickly. 
  • The Crystal reports reading from HANA run much faster. Reports that took minutes to run, now take seconds! 
  •  The interactive analysis gives the users access to relevant information directly in Excel pivots in which they are already comfortable. This gives them the needed confidence to generate their own reporting content making them less dependent on consultants or power users. 
  • The real-time “live” replication ensures all reports have up-to-the-second information and therefore allowing accurate decisions to be made.

Or Ben Holmes, the IT Director of EMPR Australia, a distributor of computer peripherals in my home country who commented that “With SAP Business One Analytics, powered by HANA , we are a more proactive organisation and a company that is easier to do business with and have a better understanding of who our customers are and how they do business with us”. The key benefits that EMPR Australia identified include

  • Various Crystal reports have been migrated, reducing analysis time from 15 minutes down to under 1 minute 
  • Allows users to leverage their existing Excel skills
  • Business data integrated into SAP Business One at ‘in memory speed’ can be easily modified and customized.

And there are many many more examples of the solution helping customers get real, actionable business insight faster and easier than ever before.

But its about more than just “speeds and feeds” as industry blogger Dennis Howlett once put to me…we are now seeing customers driving down their cost of doing business and introducing completely new ways of doing business, new service offerings and customer focused business improvements because they are now able to make decisions in real time, as their software “what if” questions and get the answers in seconds , not hours.

Imagine what your business could do with that kind of computing power….if it sounds interesting, reach out to your SAP Business One partner to find out more about HANA and what you can do with it to boost your business.

You can also download a solution brief right now from this link or feel free to take a look at this introductory webinar I have put together and embedded in this post that explains what the solution is about and as always if you have questions, you can reach out to me at richard.duffy@sap.com.