SAP Enhancements: How Does SAP Simplify the Management of Information?

SAP has launched a new set of enterprise information management (EIM) tools to support the digital transformation of information governance and business integration needs. The primary goal of the EIM tool set is to simplify the management of information in business processes and how it is shared across an organisation or a network. Other improvements include innovative methods for providing instant insights, employee engagement and supplier collaboration which all serve to improve the customer experience.

Self-Service Data Preparation

“In the digital economy, companies that are capable of delivering the most current and accurate data in the most easily consumable way possible are the ones that will survive and thrive”, according to Philip On, the Vice President of Enterprise Information Management Solutions for SAP.

As SAP have recognised this thirst for data, they have created the 1.3 version of their SAP Agile Data Preparation application. This is essentially self-service data preparation which is created with the business end-user in mind but it can also be utilised effectively by data stewards. The incredibly interactive tool allows the simple and rapid preparation of data by the user. New features include improved data aggregation and filtering capabilities, which radically speed up the amount of time that it takes users to combine large or multiple sets of data. It is now possible to view only the data which has significantly changed.

The prepared data sets are then able to be shared across an organisation or network, or else fed into an analytical application such as SAP Lumira software. The management of information on a self-service basis allows users to transform data into visual, easily consumable and actionable material. Employees are able to bypass IT teams by importing multiple data sets from cloud or onsite data sources by themselves. They will use SAP software to guide them through the cleansing and combining of data and will subsequently be presented with an attractive visual interface which is easy to use and offers one-click fixes for data that appears to be incorrect. Users are able to spend significantly more time analysing and sharing data than preparing it and are able to affect positive change across their organisation with their data insights.

In On’s words, “We make the data beautiful and ready for consumption”.

Bidirectional Extract-Transform-Load Capabilities

SAP have also enhanced their support of Hadoop, NoSQL, JSON and spatial data in their new 4.2 SP6 version of the SAP Data Services software. They have listened to feedback from their customers and noted that there is a real demand for utilising Big Data sources to improve analytical contexts and business insights. With this in mind, they have also collaborated with the search engine Google to create bidirectional extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities to Google BigQuery. This adjustment means that data can now be moved from BigQuery as well as being written to it. This simplifies the way in which their customers deal with complex nested data like JSON in BigQuery when they need to transfer it to other targets such as Hadoop.

Philip On stated “No other ETL vendor can offer bi-directional support moving data to and from BigQuery. We’re the first to offer this and we’re happy to partner with Google to make this happen.”

Policy Management

When it comes to the management of information, senior business employees recognise that data is a business asset that needs to be treated with care. The 4.2 SP6 version of the SAP Information Steward software introduces data policy management abilities which allow policies to be created at a centralised level. These policies can easily be linked to across all levels of an organisation and collaboration is easily governed.

Management Of Information Across Network

The latest SAP enhancements encourage data to be shared across networks with improved security levels. All teams and departments within your organisation can create simplified and unified data records with the use of the SAP HANA platform. This allows the consolidation of data from heterogeneous SAP and non-SAP sources to create clean, organised data which can be shared across your company.

On concludes, “With all of these recent advancements, we hope to help our customers support the digital economy by simplifying our customers’ ability to improve and maintain data quality to gain greater insights from more data sources such as big data, cloud, and spatial.”

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