SAP’s new SAP Datasphere: real-time business insights: PwC

Christopher Dinkel

Principal, SAP Data and Analytics, PwC US

Data, data everywhere

The explosion of business data has been well-documented, and today most organizations find themselves swimming in it. But putting that data to use? That’s another story, as the most essential datasets at most organizations tend to be spread far and wide across both internal and external systems. The upshot: Analyzing that data and generating reports can be painfully slow and often requires a substantial amount of manual effort to reconcile. By the time the report is created, the value of that report is often severely diminished.

Unifying all your data through SAP Datasphere

SAP Datasphere takes a big step toward helping fix that nagging issue. Now, organizations are finally able to simplify their data landscape and gain control over their data regardless of the source, whether it’s stored within SAP or outside of it, giving them much more timely access to valuable business insights.

SAP Datasphere allows customers to create what’s called a business data fabric, an architecture that provides much-needed consistency across on-premises and cloud-based data stores. What that means is that all your organization’s information is now available from a single location, accessible through the SAP ecosystem. Instead of struggling to manually pull data from multiple systems and attempting to get the various feeds to work together, SAP Datasphere does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Increasing the value of the data you already have

SAP Datasphere is especially valuable because it empowers both IT and business users. IT can enable data governance throughout its lifecycle, while business users gain access to the self-service analytical tools they need to make decisions.

One of the biggest advantages of SAP Datasphere is how it can radically improve timeliness. The long waits for reports to be finalized due to latency are mitigated, so reports are much more current every time they are run. For example, most businesses have long since become accustomed to lengthy delays for data to become available as part of various year-end and end-of-financial-period processes. With SAP Datasphere, those delays are reduced.

A leading solution

Another major value of SAP Datasphere is that it can allow clients to become more agnostic in the way they approach reporting and analytics. Historically, clients that wanted to generate a report were tied to specific technologies built into their vast, complex data warehouses. SAP Datasphere offers a virtualized approach to reporting, so clients can take the most effective capabilities from various vendors and unify them all to create a reporting experience that works the way they want it to. Data isn’t ever locked up in an SAP database; the data fabric architecture unifies all of your organization’s data stores where they already live, opening up new ways of operating.

The real-time nature of SAP Datasphere can’t be underestimated, and all types of enterprises can benefit from the enhanced access to timely insights it provides. Consider one example around inventory: With inventory data available in real time, clients can have much greater Availability to Promise (ATP) accuracy, providing them the ability to guarantee that a certain level of inventory is available to ship while also generating crucial insights that can be used to plan production operations. Similarly, profitability analysis becomes much more compelling in a SAP Datasphere environment. By unifying SAP data with financial systems of record, it becomes easier to locate where profits might be being lost – and to plan corrective action.

SAP Datasphere can also open the door for clients to take advantage of more advanced and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, all of which rely on having high-quality, real-time data upon which to train their various models.

Get started with SAP Datasphere today

With SAP Datasphere PwC can increase the value we bring to clients. This enables PwC to leverage the capabilities of our SAP practice alongside our analytics and insight partners. Finally, we are able to bring our top capabilities to the table, both inside and outside of the SAP ecosystem, regardless of the technologies our client relies upon.