Hello everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Zarmina, and I'll be hosting this webinar. Our topic for today is Smart Features and self-service analytics with SAP BusinessObjects BI, and we're very pleased to have our product expert and speaker here with us today, Priti Mulchandani. Before I do hand it over to Priti, I'd just like to go over some housekeeping tips so that we're all comfortable navigating this space. Firstly, we really do enjoy seeing all of your questions, so please do utilize the Q&A box on the bottom of your screen. You can ask us any questions that you have during the webinar, and we'll be answering them throughout. There might also be some time at the end of the webinar to answer some frequently asked questions.
We also have some resources listed for you in the resource box on your webinar console. Over here you can find any extra resources to learn more about SAP Analytics Cloud. You can access the slides for today's session, as well as a link for any upcoming webinars in this series. Lastly, I'd just like to point out our survey. We really do appreciate all of your feedback, and we definitely prioritize it when we're planning future webinars. This does help us plan topics that you all would find useful and enjoy. Please do try and take some time to fill that out. It's only two questions, so it shouldn't take too long, and you can actually access the survey widget by clicking on the three smiley faces on your bottom toolbar. That's all for my introduction.
Now without any further ado, I'll hand it over to Priti to kick off the presentation.
Hi, everyone. Zarmina, can you hear me okay?
Yep, I can hear you.
Okay. Hello Everyone, and thanks for attending this webinar. Thanks, Zarmina, for introduction. As Zarmina introduced, I am Priti Mulchandani. I'm part of the product management team in the augmented BI cluster of SAP Analytics Cloud, and really welcome you all to enjoy the session today, where we'll be focusing on the Smart Features or predictive features in SAP Analytics Cloud. I will be showing, first of all, slides just to set the background, set some stage, and then I will move to the live demo, in our system. Finally we will have the question and answers. I have Katrina as well to answer some of the questions. Feel free to enter it in the chat, and let me know if you want anything in between. Yeah, I'll kick off the slides now.
The first information in order to set the background for this session is that we will be focusing on the augmented analytics piece. Before that, I think from SAP Analytics Cloud, we should recognize the fact that we are honoring all the different business type of users. All the users personas, ranging from IT, then to analyst, and then finally to the information worker. What you see on the left-hand side is basically an IT persona, which helps in preparing the enterprise reporting, like normal visualization, historical data reporting, and analysis. The IT persona would come into picture to prepare the data models, set the connections in SAP Analytics Cloud. In case of BOE landscape, it will be setting up the connection to universes, either live connection or offline connection. That would be the work that IT and developers would do.
The next one is self-service analytics. This is the place where analysts, like business analysts and data analysts, come into picture. This is basically the audience where the data is in place already by IT and development, but they would want to do some slice and dice analysis, using the self-service features in SAP Analytics Cloud that you will see in the demo. They would want to kind of prepare the dashboards and visualizations for sharing with other users. They can do drill downs, they can do linked analysis and so on. This will be the analyst where we are focusing on aspect of self-service analytics. Finally, this is augmented analytics. In our case, we call it as Smart Features. These are the features which are based on the machine learning and AI technology, and they would provide automated predictive and insight out of the data.
This, we think it fits into the information worker persona, which is any business user in our day-to-day life. It could be a financial controller, it could be a manufacturing or production manager, or it could be a sales vice president or a sales customer service representative. Basically if they are looking at the data, automated insights are generated out of data and shown to you in a very easy-to-understand visualization and very quickly. This is where the technology is helping us, and this is the place of focus for today in this session. The comparison to SAP BusinessObjects BI suite and SAP Analytics is the following. You might have seen this slide already. With respect to BI, traditional business intelligence, where we have features like exploration, discovery, and dashboards, SAC is quite okay there.
Crystal reporting is one component which we probably do not have a replacement in SAC, but in addition, the complementary features are planning and augmented analytics. As I mentioned, the session will focus on augmented analytics, but planning is also a feature which is part of SAP. SAP provides the combination of three to help you with your business decisions. When we talk about augmented analytics or augmented intelligence, we are really talking about three different pillars. We're talking about three technological enhancements that have been used recently in the analytics tools, and they are natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. What we are saying here is that basically the existing dashboard and reporting capabilities are augmented with these technologies, AI, ML, and NLP technologies, in order to provide you automated explanation, predictive insights, or even allowing you to do data-driven decisions.
This is why we are talking about the term augmented intelligence. What happens in case of business layman terms, if you are a user, either you are an analyst or a business user, what questions can you get answered from these technologies and tools that we are showing in this webinar? It could be a question like, "What will be my profit next quarter?" Or, "What was the profit last quarter?" It could be the questions like, "How many employees I had in case of an HR scenario?" Or it could be an example as in, "Who's the best performing salesperson in the U.S. region?" These are the questions you can answer. You can also answer the questions for future. This is where our predictive features will come into picture.
You could say, for example, "Will I be out of stock in next few months?" Or, "What will be my revenue or expense forecast for next six months or next year?" Depending on your data. Finally, we have the insights feature that would give you the drivers, the key drivers that are affecting your particular KPI in business. These are the type of questions you can answer. We are not limited to, but this is just to give you a flavor as a business user, what you can demand from SAP Analytics Cloud. Okay. The next is a slide before I move on to demo. I just wanted to translate these questions and translate the technologies into the features we have in SAP Analytics Cloud. We call it a Smart Features, and we have six of them.
Depending on your need, depending on the question, one or the other feature is used. I would also come to a point later on in order to say which one is supported on the Live UNX connection and which one we have supported on the offline connectivity. First of all the features work with the offline connection. They are part of SAP Analytics Cloud. There is no separate license needed. They are part of the default basic license, standard license, which means that if you have access to SAP Analytics Cloud, you can get started with Smart Features even today. The first feature is Search to Insight. This is the NLQ capability, natural language query, and natural language generation capability.
This is where you ask a question in simple, plain English, and then you get an answer as an analytics or a visualization, which helps you build your analysis and dashboards quickly. This is basically, you can imagine you are using Google Search or any search that you use in your sessions, in your day-to-day life. It's exactly similar to that, but here you are asking the questions with respect to the data models that you have in SAP, and you get answers, which are charts and visualization, which you can add back to your dashboard. We have Smart Discovery. This is our exploration capability. Every feature is proceeding with the name smart, so it would be difficult to differentiate. If you think about discovery, you're trying to discover or explore your data. You're trying to discover interesting patterns and relationships in your data.
That's where Smart Discovery comes into picture. This feature is based on the machine learning algorithm that are in-house. They are proprietary to SAP. We have classification and regression machine learning scenarios supported in here, and you would see that it is really simple. Once you have your data model, you basically specify what is the target of it, what is the interest target, and what is the KPI that you want to find the patterns and relationships, and then this will generate an output, a discovery for you. We have Smart Insights. It's getting quite a popularity from all the customers. We receive very good feedback about this feature. This is, without overwhelming the user with lot of different insights coming from different charts, data, calculations, it will automatically drive your attention to the key contributors. That we would see in the demo again.
We have time series forecasting. As the name suggests, this would produce the forecast for future. Depending on the hierarchy, time hierarchy, you have it in your data, you can ask the forecast for quarters, months, and years, and so on, and it depends on how much data in your dataset is there. The more the data, the higher the number of forecast periods you would be able to generate for future. We have Smart Grouping. This is the clustering technique. Again, this is also based on the machine learning technique that we have our IP with. This is similar to K-means. If you're aware with the data science terminology, this algorithm is similar to K-means clustering algorithm, which helps you to group or cluster different values in your data, with respect to the KPI or metric that you're analyzing.
The example of this could be, group all the customers in U.S., according to the sales they have or according to the number of products they buy from us. That clustering will form three, four, five, six groups, and it will group them based on the common relationship these customers have. It's generic. It's not limited to the sales data. I just took an example of sales because it's easy to understand. All the features are generic, irrespective of industry, irrespective of your process, it would be working as long as you provide it in a proper data model shape. Finally, we have a Smart Predict feature. This is more for, I would say, analyst persona as compared to the information worker persona. This is because information workers will consume the results of Smart Predict. For example, which employees would be leaving in next month.
That would be the kind of answer I'm getting from Smart Predict. It's giving me predictions for future. It helps me to base my decision on the outcome generated from Smart Predict. For building a process, when you build actually Smart Predict, you have to create a predictive scenario. This is where a business or a data analyst comes into picture. They need to understand, not the knowledge of a data science per se, but they need to recognize the fact that if a predictive model is good quality or not, they can tweak in with some parameters. They can control some variables before actually receiving the output of predictive algorithm and giving it in the hands of a business user. That's the Smart Predict feature.
Yeah, I just wanted to give you the overview at this stage about the six different features before I go into the demo of these features on top of universe data. I'll just pause here for a minute and, Zarmina and Kat, just checking with you if the pace is all right, and it's going okay for now, or if there are any questions.
Hi there, Priti. There is one question. Somebody did ask a roadmap, a question about languages. I don't know if you want to keep that for the end or address that now.
Okay.
The roadmap for available languages.
Okay. For the language support, right? The language support.
Yes
related translation support. Yeah. Basically, SAC supports various different languages. When we generate the output from Smart Discovery or Smart Insights or Search to Insight, it is language independent. That means it would consider the language that you are logged in. It will show the output in the translated language. Only the limitation is currently with Search to Insight feature. That means that you can ask the question on only English language. We have a roadmap item for Search to Insight, which is regarding supporting the natural language query terminology, in different languages. It also means that your data could be in different language as well. If I say the question is, what was my revenue in last quarter? If your name of a revenue in English is something else in French, if you use that, it would understand.
If instead of what if, you type in something else in French, it won't understand. This is the support I mean. The phrases that we use are currently only for English language in Search to Insight, there is a roadmap item plan even to support that in different languages. Apart from it, all the generated output and all the different features support different type of languages. I think I'll tackle the questions at the end. I think it's good to move on to demo because it will take half an hour to demo all the features.
Yeah, that would be a good idea.
Okay, thanks. Yeah, I'm going to share my screen. Kat or Zarmina, if you can confirm, if you're able to see everything, that would be a good go ahead for me. Can you see my screen?
Yeah, we can see your screen, Priti.
Before I go into SAP Analytics Cloud and show you the self-service and augmented analytics, I just wanted to quickly say that we fully recognize the data preparation and the amount of information you have in the BOE stack. We do support the connectivity to Universe and WebI documents, and this would be taken care of by the Smart Features, at least with respect to acquired or offline connectivity. I'll quickly mention what is possible for the live as well. First of all, sorry. I have here the dataset. Just a second. I need to set do not disturb for my Teams. Okay, I'm sharing the screen again. Currently, I'm sharing the system which I have remote logged in. This is the place where I have BusinessObjects Explorer and different capabilities within it.
I'm showing an Excel file just for the purpose of a demo. I have my data, which is focusing on the CRM use case. This is how my data looks like. In real world, it could be coming from SAP Cloud for Customer system or S/4HANA system. You could have many different joins with BW, your own third-party data files, so on. Here, for the purpose of a demo, I have this Excel file, CSV file, this is the data about CRM. What I have here is different sales for different products, regions, and customer across the world. I have, in a world of Cube or BOE, I have some measures as well as some dimensions, a date variable, to play around with different functions that I mentioned as part of the Smart Assist portfolio.
Once I have this data, what I have done is, as a sample, I've created a universe out of it. Here, first of all, this was a connection against my offline scenario. It's a simple ODBC driver for Microsoft Excel. It's a simple foundation layer, and then I have a universe. Here in my universe, I can set filters, as you would be all aware of, or I could put the restrictions with respect to column or row filters or authorizations. That's all good. For the purpose of a demo, I'm just keeping it plain, simple. When I data preview, all the columns are there. This will be the place, basically, all information is there in the universe. Like I mentioned, you would have different data sets.
This is all respected, and there will be no change with respect to how the data is situated in BOE. There is nothing needed on top. Once we have that, we move on to the SAP Analytics Cloud. Now I'm going to SAP Analytics Cloud. Actually, maybe before that, I would show quickly the Universe connection. Here, I'm in SAP Analytics Cloud, and I'm in the Connections panel. First of all, in order to make use of different data situated in different boxes, such as HANA, Universe, and things like that, this is the place where you will be coming. This is mainly for developer and IT roles. They will be coming and forming the connection to the systems. There are two connection types, as you know, acquired data connection and live data connection.
In this case, I have one for acquired Universe connection and one for Live. This is the one, let's say, for Live. In that case, I specify the hostname and HTTPS port for my BusinessObjects system and the username and password mechanism that I want. This is all that you need for the Live connectivity. For the acquired connection, what you additionally need is a Cloud Connector, which is making sure that you can securely access the data from Universe, which is sitting behind your company firewall. This is the place where you will be specifying your system. Again, the host and port for BOE, the location that you have in the Cloud Connector, and the username and password. Once I have that, I will be basically creating a model in SAC. Everything in SAP Analytics Cloud is based on the model.
There are different types of models, but this is equivalent to your universe or the data model that you might be familiar already. When we create a model, we can pick the connection. We can either say it's based on the live data connection or it is based on the acquired data connection. In this case, for example, if I choose this and select my connection that I already configured, I'm saying that I want to form a new query, and basically, this is all the universes that are exposed in that query. This was the one that I showed with respect to sales example. In this query builder, you would be able to select the fields that you want or maybe the filters that you want to create for your analysis before you move to the stories and dashboards.
This is the place where you will be able to create queries or create a model based on the Universe query. Once you do that, you will have a model, you can start creating the stories on top. I'm moving to a different system where I have the whole demo set up. I already created a dashboard, which is very user-friendly and which helps me to easily explain it to you. Here I come into this system. First thing I wanted to start is by actually starting from scratch by creating a story. I'm going to focus on the Smart Features, but I'm starting with creation of a story based on the Universe data I have.
Like I mentioned, we created a model in the system, and this model gives me a gateway to all the data that you have in Universe. Here, I want to select that model when I create a story. This is the model I have. I've already created for the purpose of demo in this system. When I point my story to the model, I see already the Explorer. This, again, you would be familiar with the BusinessObjects Explorer, very similar to that. Here I get automatically identified with measures and dimensions and special dimensions like version, category, and so on. I can just do some drill down, I can play around with it and do some exploration here. For example, I have a measure called number of customer meetings or total expected revenue.
I can see it by different dimensions and all the dimensions are showed here. For instance, I had a date dimension. This is a hierarchical dimension. I have year, quarter, and monthly hierarchy. What I'm going to do is that basically, say that, I want to have a flat representation of it just for the purpose of this demo, again, and to get a line chart quickly. You see here, a line chart is automatically created, which is showing me the expected revenue, which was one of my measure. It's basically the revenue in the historical periods, and that I'm going to analyze in this dashboard. At the end of the story building, I'm basically preparing a sales analysis that I can share with my sales vice president and the sales team.
I want to see how Smart Features would be helping me with different types of insights automatically. I am currently at the stage where I have explored the data, historical data, some measure and dimension combinations, and now I'm going to utilize the Smart Features functionality. Let's say I'm interested in this chart, which is showing me the total expected revenue by date. Here, I'm going to launch one of the first features of the Smart portfolio, which is forecast. This is very easy to understand. I have the data till November 3, 2020 in this example, and then I wanted to generate the forecast. I simply clicked on this three buttons icon and selected add. I have different functions from SAP.
I can add a reference line, I can add a tool tip, but I'm selecting a forecast here, which is based on the predictive algorithm. I'm selecting the default automated forecast. This is based on our IP and machine learning algorithm, but you also have a choice to move to a different type of algorithm. If you understand maybe a little bit of a data science, you could say that triple exponential smoothing or logistic regression might be a better fit in this scenario, depending on my data and the type of patterns they hold. You can select that algorithm. Most of the cases, what we have seen in the customer scenarios, this works very well. The automatic technique works very well. Here you see very quickly, my forecast was generated for next year, July 2021. Yeah, almost for next seven, eight periods.
It automatically determined the next forecasting period based on the data that I had in my previous dataset. That was the forecasting feature. Here, I get some hints that the forecasting quality is good. It is actually five by five. In some cases, if the quality is not good, it is basically that could happen if the data is not sufficient or maybe there is not interesting patterns that the algorithm could derive. It could be that all the values for your last 18 months is same. It is the expected revenue was EUR 3 million also. Yeah, in that case, the quality may not be good, and you get also this indicator, which we call it as confidence interval, which is indicated here in the light blue screen. I'll do a full mode full screen just that it is clearly visible for you guys.
Here you see this is the light blue kind of a patch, which indicates a confidence interval, which is indicating how accurately the predictive forecast is with respect to the historical data. In this case, again, it's not too bad. I would say the narrower the confidence interval, the better your forecast accuracy. That's all indicated using this dotted line and this patch confidence interval. From business endpoint, I did not have any data science knowledge, or I did not say which machine learning algorithm I want to use. All I clicked was a single option, which was add forecast on my existing chart. That's it basically. The forecast is obviously available for the data where you have time periods, so you will have a date variable or a time variable in your dataset.
It has to have a time series, or it works for the line and time series charts in this example, in this case. That's the first feature, forecasting feature. I will move on to the next feature, let's say, which is Search to Insight. This is the NLQ feature, as I said. What we are doing is using this light bulb, we are launching the Search to Insight. Let me place this here. There is a search bar. The search bar comes at the bottom, and the analysis comes at the top. I can start asking the question. I could say, for example, show me the number of customer meetings. As I type in, if the typed text matches to one of your member dimension or measure names, it auto-completes.
This feature, Search to Insight, is supported for Live Universe, but for live connections, we need indexing. I'll quickly show when we go to the model, we have to enable indexing. The indexing, what it does is basically it scans the metadata like dimension, measure, and member names, and it caches so that it could auto-complete as a user is typing in and basically retrieves the results faster. That is needed because in case of live scenarios, you would have huge amounts of data. Even in acquired scenario for auto-completion, you would want that flexibility to come in. That is why we need indexing. In this case, I have acquired data, I did not have to index, and it is automatically completing for me. I'm saying, show me a number of customer meetings, and I could say by sector or by customer name.
Let's first just do it for customer meeting. This is only a single measure, so it has automatically generated a KPI type of a chart. It's saying number of customer meetings is 9,937. I can start typing in, very similar to the SQL query, but this is a natural language query, even simpler than SQL. As I start typing in, I automatically get the proposal of different dimensions I can do this by. I can say, do it by country. In this case, it has generated a bar chart showing me the metric that is number of customer meetings by different country. I can use different phases like, I could say for 2018, which will automatically create a filter with respect to time.
As you can see here, it has created a filter, and it has automatically provided me the output analysis for the year 2018. Yeah, that's the power of NLQ. Very simple to use, easier to understand, and again, fast because you get the analysis quickly, and it will automatically generate a different type of charts as they suit. You can also say that you want to see it as a pie chart, for example. I use this, and let's say I like this chart and it can then copy to my existing story. It is copied to page one, and this is the page that I'm already currently in. I started with the new document, and I was in the page one, and I did this chart that you see at the bottom of a page from Search to Insight.
I did not have to create it myself as a story designer or as an analyst or a developer or IT. It was available for me just as a business user. That's one of the feature, Search to Insight. Then I will use the other feature, which is Smart Insights. I wanted to first show it for a measure here. Let's say we have this, again, for any of the features, for Smart Insights and Search to Insight, you do not need edit rights. They are even available for information worker, for consumers. In this case, I have selected, just as an example to show you, I have selected a numeric point chart. I can see my total expected revenue is around EUR 3 million. I can do the usual SAP analytic function. I can say that I want to see the scale format as million.
I have EUR 322 million as the total expected revenue coming in from my data that I had in Universe. Now I can launch Smart Insights feature. If I'm in an editor, I can use this, again, three dots and select the Add Smart Insights feature, which will automatically do a natural language generation for me. As you can see here, it has run an algorithm and showed me a nice insight. Again, I'll just go to the view mode for the purpose of clarity. Here it is telling me, Smart Insights, again, a light bulb symbol, that total so far for the December is EUR 8.34 million. It has calculated all the totals for the entire data set and the total for November 2020.
In this case, I have a data till November 2020, so it is telling me that EUR 8.28 million, it is a decrease of 16% as compared to October 2020. What it is doing is it has automatically detected a change, a significant change over time. You can call it as a change detection or how it has changed inside. What it is doing is it is scanning your data set and automatically figuring out where did the maximum change happen. In this case, it happened in month of November, where my revenue, expected revenue seems to be 16% lower than the October 2020. If I click on view more, I have different types of insights to help me with that. This is the insight that we already talked about. How has this changed?
It's a change detection, and it produces a variance chart for me. It tells me that this is how the revenue has been trending. I have different types of hierarchies. I can view it by quarter as well. If I like, if I'm in an edit mode, even I can add this chart. Now I'm in the view mode, as you can see here. I am analyzing the information and consuming the information, I can see it in the side panel here directly. Without a designer having to add these charts or overwhelming the end user with all these charts and results, what we are doing is we are empowering an end user to do the slice and dice and insights out of the data by themselves. That's the really powerful mechanism and the feedback that we are continuously getting.
This is not available in any other tools like Tableau or Power BI. Power BI has kind of insights, our insights, as we feel at least, is more attractive, more business-friendly, and it answers various sets of questions. The second type of question, for example, we are answering is the top contributor. This is again, very popular and insight type used in our customer scenarios, apart from forecasting and search, as you already saw. Here, what it has done is again, run a statistical calculation. If we're giving out what are the top five contributors, it has looked into all the dimensions in the dataset and said, for a given total expected revenue measure or a KPI, what would be most interesting for you to focus on?
In other words, we could say that this customer, Carstens GmbH, sorry for wrong pronunciation, but this seems to be driving highest revenue. Out of the 322, EUR 30 million alone is driven by this top 10 values, and around EUR 303k is driven by this particular customer. This gives me the hint that these are my top 10 customers for the customer name dimension, and I should really focus on them. I should keep maintaining a good relationship if I want to see a CP. That would be one indication. There were different dimensions like length of sales cycle, contract level. This was the CRM data. Let's say I have a contract level, a C-level. We see again that 97% C-level contract type is working for us.
There is a manager-level contract type and individual contributor level for sales personnel. C-level is fitting better for me. Similarly, I have a length of sales cycle for closing the sales deals, where one year length of sales cycle is actually better for me. I can launch Smart Insights again by clicking on the Smart Insights context menu, and selecting this Smart Insights light bulb. What it is doing now is rerunning the algorithm for the context that I chose. I have selected total expected revenue, now specifically for one year. This time it has completely refreshed the results. As you can see, this has actually focused on the data, which is with respect to length of sales cycle as one year, and here it has shown me different type of parameters.
Some of the top contributors could be same, but some of the top contributors could be different. For example, we did not see that we are particularly good with the customer segment Fortune 500 when it comes to one year. I think if I have to summarize the output of Smart Insights is that it helps me giving the insights automatically. It is doing really fast. It is context sensitive. As I change my data, or in case of live scenarios, if the data changes, it automatically recognizes that data change and it helps me to answer the question. It helps me things like what are my best contributors, and if I want to focus on specific contributor, I can go on and on by launching the Smart Insights again.
In this sales example, I got to know that we are doing particularly well for this particular customer. Length of sales cycle should be one year, contract level should be C-level, and the customer segment is Fortune 500. If I focus on this combination, my total expected revenue will be awesome. That's the kind of an output we have got from this functionality. We are halfway through our demo, and these were the three different features out of six Smart Features. I'm just repeating the fact that we had forecast, time-series forecasting, we had search insights, we have Smart Insights. I'm going to share this Smart Grouping feature, which is a clustering feature. In that case, I'm going to draw the chart again. Let's say I have total expected revenue as my measure, and this is a correlation graph, so it's a bubble chart.
Maybe I can choose the scatter plot. This feature is available for bubble and scatter plot charts, and I have different measures here. Let's say I wanted to understand this grouping by country. Maybe this is a country is not good. What I do is that I see a Smart Grouping feature. Here you can see that all the countries are grouped together, U.K., U.S., India, Russia, all the countries are grouped together. It makes me hard to analyze this information. I wanted to see how total expected revenue and number of customer meetings are related for country. I switch on the Smart Grouping option. By default, it has two groups, but you can increase the number of groups that you want to generate. Let's say I increase it to four, and just for the purpose of visualization, I'm changing the color.
Maybe I just do six and go to view mode. Yeah, here you can see that six groups have been generated. Group one is a cluster that only has basically country China. It indicates that the total expected revenues are around EUR 29 million. Number of customer meetings is total customer meetings is 9,257. You can use the calculation. Instead of total number of customer meetings, you might want to say average number of customer meetings. That's absolutely fine. This would give you an idea that, how many customer meetings, what is the stage at which you can convince your customers? How many customer meetings, drive how much revenue for which country? This is very easily done by the smart groups because it has grouped similar countries together.
We see here in the group four, we have country Brazil indicated with this pink dot, group four, and then in group four, I also have India. India and Brazil have been grouped together based on the total expected revenue they drive and based on the number of meetings I have to have in order to convince my customers. That's my grouping feature. It's based on machine learning algorithm, and you can configure the number of groups. You can see here the quality of the machine learning algorithm, which is green, which means it's a good one. In some cases, if you do not see good quality, again, it would mean that more data points will be needed for that to work. That's my grouping. The four features are on, and then I'm going to use the Smart Discovery feature.
You see here, I am in the dashboard and story area of SAP Analytics Cloud, and one by one, I'm just making use of the Smart Features to give me insights, to generate forecast, or to help me with my analysis. I move to Smart Discovery feature. This is an exploration part. It automatically kind of builds some dashboard for you as well. In this example of the sales demo, which was based on my Universe data that I just shared, I actually renamed the order value measured here to total expected value. What I'm interested in this is this sales revenue or expected revenue figures in order to see what relationships and patterns can be found based on the machine learning algorithm. I have advanced options. For example, I can exclude dimensions that I don't need.
For instance, if I have a transaction ID, I think I've modeled it. It was modeled as a measure. Okay, no, it don't see, sorry about that. I think that's already excluded. Anyway, I don't want to exclude any of the dimensions. I want to derive the results based on all dimensions in this case. Oh, yeah. Here is the transaction number. Then, there are no filters. If I want, I can perform this analysis, for example, only United States, or I can choose any filter. I could say that only do it for the customer segment, Fortune 500, and so on. This is the configuration options I have got as an analyst and as a business user.
Once I do that, it will generate the output for me, which will be four different pages full of insights and full of nice output that you would see out of the predictive algorithm. As you can see here, it is telling me that Smart Discovery uses machine learning algorithm to generate a story based on your data. It would take few seconds because it is training the data, it is materializing the output, and then it is automatically building the charts for you. There you go. You see here four pages. I was in a page one earlier, and now suddenly I have four different pages coming from Smart Discovery. There is an overview page, there is a key influencer page, there is unexpected values page, and finally simulation. Smart Discovery feature, first of all, is not supported for any live sources yet.
We have it on the plan. This would be, for your case, it will be only working for the offline or acquired Universe connectivity or any acquired data if you upload it in SAP Analytics Cloud or any of the data sources that we support as part of import connection, like BW import, like Universe import and so on. Obviously the live connections are in roadmap. It is a bit tricky to support the live connection for Smart Discovery because it needs the machine learning library that is present in HANA DB. In SAP Analytics Cloud, we already have this machine learning library present, and that's why we are able to generate the Smart Discovery results in the offline scenario because the data is directly present there.
In case of a live remote scenarios, we would need that library, which is only possible in case of HANA today or supported on HANA. Going back to the Smart Discovery results, you see here, all the four pages were generated for me. I have different types of charts. First of all, forecast is automatically generated, like I showed before. Even you don't need to generate forecast. If you're using Smart Discovery, it automatically do it for you. I see the total expected revenue. There is a variance which tells me difference between forecast and actual and forecast. Actually, we were doing better historically as compared to the forecast that is predicted for next few months. I have these two versions, we can see here the distribution of this revenue in terms of number of records I have.
Here, this is indicating that 1,242 records in my dataset have the expected sales revenue at EUR 37 million. Most of my customer transactions tend to fall in this category, and the total expected revenue is EUR 37 million out of that. That's the output that it is producing, and it does the combination with other dimension and measures. It has done the combination analysis with other dimension and measures. How is my revenue with respect to version, with respect to date, with respect to product type, contract level, and so on? You see here in Smart Discovery itself, we have utilized two different features of Smart Portfolio, forecasting and Smart Insights. We are automatically generating the Smart Insights for the charts where possible and forecasting again for the charts where possible.
Here I see that in case of C-level and entrepreneurs, this is the type of a combination as top contributor. The most interesting page in case of a Smart Discovery, or most useful we are seeing, is the key influencer information. Machine learning is saying that for expected revenue, key metric that you have asked for this machine to give answers on, it has found this top nine key influencer in this case, and it seems that the customer segment has the highest influence. Let's see how the customer segment is influencing. It is saying that most of my sales is coming from Fortune 500 segment, followed by Enterprise and SMB, and this is the top influencer. This is how the record frequency is coming up, followed by the next influencer, which is number of customer meetings.
You can see that actually higher the number of customer meetings, higher the expected revenue amount. We have different batches or bands. We have range where we have zero to four customer meetings, then between 15 to 20, and then where we have 32 customer meetings. For one customer, we have 32 meetings, and we seem to drive in total EUR 149K revenue out of those. That helps me in understanding or deciding for future, how should I base my different sales parameters in order to achieve highest sales revenue in future. This is an analysis on the historical data in order to give you hints for your future. We have an unexpected values page. You can call it outliers as well.
What it is saying in this case is that, the total expected revenue, in terms of actual, what we already have, for instance, is EUR 181. The algorithm was predicting less in this case, which was 60/60. This is a good sign. This is the combination of value. It has picked up an exact record from the dataset where we have this situation. Unexpected values are nothing but out of the ordinary or extraordinary, which system did not expect. It has analyzed the pattern, which was usually followed in the dataset. These are seven or eight, some records, in this case, 17 records, which are out of the ordinary. There are some charts to help you further, like a bubble chart where you can see that how is the actual versus expected is different. Finally, we have a simulation page.
Again, it is automatically generated for you, as I mentioned. This gives you a what-if simulation capability. This allows you to simulate a combination that you haven't tried in your business, in your use case. For this example, I can see here all the variables that have influence, either positive, negative influence, neutral, weakly positive, strongly positive, and so on. Let's say, I have never tried a combination of country China, let's select China, and number of customer meetings as 30. Maybe the customer segment is prior. I hit simulate. You see there is a 15% decline if I go for this combination. It appears that if we go for a China customer segment, and if we select a prior customer status, then maybe the expected value will be less. Let's see how if I choose the current customer segment.
It is +12%. Depending on what values you are selecting, it will be allowing you to simulate the output, and show you what will you be expecting in future for this combination. Sorry. That's the Smart Discovery feature. I think we are coming closer to the time, and I need to answer questions. I'll quickly show you the Smart Predict feature, which is the final thing. This is the Smart Predict. Here it allows you to do the business analyst, or data analyst type of, let's say, understanding of predictive models. Here you give your model either a planning model or a dataset. This is a Predictive Scenario, first of all, and then you select a type of a Predictive Scenario, which is classification, if you want to predict if the employee or customer will churn.
It is a regression if you want to say, "Okay, how many days my delivery is expected in future, how many days it will be expected in future." The forecasting algorithm, which is basically I selected gross revenue from my data, and I want to say that, "Create a predictive model based on the date." Also, I've selected an LoB. For every individual LoB, I want to generate a forecast for revenues. Once I do that, I hit Train and Forecast. It is creating many different predictive models for me. Sorry. For every individual LoB, it has generated one predictive model. That's the power of Smart Predict. It's segmented forecasting scale.
If you have, let's say, 2,000 different entities, LoBs, or maybe you have 2,000 different customer segments, and every customer segment varies from each other, and you want to use either the forecasting scenario or you are doing the classification scenario, it helps you to scale your predictive models or predictive results. As you can see here, the forecast is generated, or a predictive model is generated for different LoBs, and it shows me some kind of a performance indicators like MAPE, which could be understood by data analyst. It shows me details on signal analysis, like if the signal is trending downwards or moving upwards, if there were fluctuations, if there were cycles like Christmas period and so on, and if there were outliers.
These are the details which your data analyst will want to analyze on different datasets with different combinations in the side panel before they actually can give you a model that you can trust. Once you trust that model, you will be selecting to apply that. Once you apply it, that will be generating an output in your stories or in the planning module. This is the forecast. Again, this is generated. This is analysis that is helping you to decide your predictive model quality. You can create as many predictive models as you want with different combinations, and once you are happy, like I said, you will apply it, and finally, you'll be seeing the results. Here, this is my final dashboard. This is combining all the Smart Features I showed to you. Here I am showing you the results of Smart Predict.
I had actual data, and then I had this copy actual data, where basically I copied the 2019 data, used Smart Predict to generate the forecast for 2020. Here you can see the 2020 forecast is generated based on the screen that I was sharing with you earlier. It has generated for different LoBs. I have here, this is my kind of a P&L report for the same sales example, but I have different LoBs. If I want, I can see specifically there's a filter for a LoB, and I can move it from there. That was the power of Smart Predict, gives you more control over predictive models and applying the results back for your business users.
Yeah, I'll stop here, and sorry for the time with the demo, but I hope it was useful, and I can move on to the question and answer. Katrina or Zarmina, if you want to kind of read some important ones that are not answered, that would be nice for me.
Yeah, absolutely. The biggest question here is what features are supported with live connectivity, I would say. I'm not sure if you're planning to share a slide or we can share something with them afterwards.
I'm currently sharing the screen with respect to the live connectivity support on this presentation mode. This is a complete matrix against all different data sources that are supported in SAP Analytics Cloud and specifically for different Smart Features, what is possible there. In short, time series forecasting, Smart Grouping, and Search to Insight are currently supported on Live Universe, for example. Most of the live connectivity, like SAP HANA, BW, and so on. Smart Insights we have started supporting on Live HANA, but Universe is on our roadmap. Next is BW, and then there will be Universe. Smart Discovery and Smart Predict is something that will be quite far. That's why you see the blue indicator, which means it is in future. By future, we don't know the date yet. It could be in a year or two years' time.
We can't say for sure, but we are evaluating the options of providing Smart Discovery and Smart Predict also for Live Universe and different live connectivity support. Yeah, I think, I mean, the slides will be distributed, so you can take your time and see basically which combination works there for you. Right? They would get the slides.
Okay, perfect. The other popular question is the language support. I know that you provided a bit of an answer earlier on, but, we probably don't have time to get into the details for the answer, but in the following Q&A blog, let's just make sure we include some information there, I would suggest, because we're at the top of the hour.
Right. Yeah. What languages are supported? There is an online help. We can, like you said, we can include the FAQ page, we can share with them. Actually, it is already available online. If you just search for supported languages in SAP Analytics Cloud, I think there are 70 languages supported from Spanish to Hindi to French. Yeah. I think you should not be short of the output support there. All the Smart Features respect those languages except asking the question for Search to Insight. There's a question on, does SAP Analytics Cloud has a feature to keep the actual and show forecast so as to have a comparison? Absolutely. Ideal, can a dual axis be done for actual versus forecast?
You have table control, you have charts, you can definitely show actual, and you can generate the forecast using the capabilities that I demoed. If you have a forecast already in your dataset as a column, that will be shown, and you can create a variance basically to compare. We call it as a feature called variance. You can compare actual and forecast to see how both of them compare with each other. I think for the live connection, the decks will be shared. Most of the questions are that, Katrina, like you said, and I cannot answer for the conversion tool question. Thanks, Katrina, for answering many of the questions already. Is it possible to have more influence on the ML algorithms? I should have possibly clarified, not too much.
Through Smart Predict, you can select, for example, which type of predictive scenario you are creating. Is it classification, regression, or forecasting? In future, maybe clustering. You cannot control the specific algorithm that you choose. SAP Analytics Cloud is a business-friendly tool. Our intention is to provide the ML and AI technology in the hands of business users, and for that, we don't expect them to know machine learning algorithm. I can share the blogs that will show you the exact machine learning algorithm that we use inside. All the features are based on our own proprietary machine learning algorithms. What about integration of results from Smart Predict existing charts within SAP dashboard? Would it be possible as it now with the time series forecasting feature? Yeah, Smart Predict means a concept of a dataset.
You can create a dataset against Universe connection or offline. It is not supported for Live Universe, for instance, or Live BW, for instance, but it is supported for Live HANA. The output of a dataset can be seen in a table. You have to create a story and you have to link it to the dataset. There is also a feature on the roadmap, which talks about the Smart Predict output with models. Yeah, model is a different artifact, dataset is a different artifact. We have it on the roadmap that Smart Predict would support models also, which means all your visualization and charts would be taking that output. As a workaround today, we create a model based on the output dataset, which is provided by Smart Predict.
You create a predictive scenario, you apply it, you get the output, which is a dataset, and finally, you create a model on top of the dataset. It's a two-step process currently, but we are looking in future to make it straightforward or smoothen it, so that it's only based on the BI models. What's the option with connectivity like Big Data, Azure Data Lake, AWS, and Google? There are options available as part of SAC. You can connect to Google BigQuery, AWS, and Azure Data Lake. I think it was possible, or on the roadmap, we can search for that. Yeah, for predictive features, it doesn't matter. It's the SAC connectivity that offers you, once you have the data from these sources, then you can use all of the Smart Features as I shared.
Is it possible to get the samples of migration to SAP HANA Cloud? Sorry, I did not understand the question. Maybe Katrina, you would know about that.
No, I'm not sure either. Sorry.
Okay. We are using the SAP Lumira Discovery, a self-service tool. At this point, we have dashboards on energy component. After deploying the dashboard to BI server, end user has to key in the user credentials for EC system. I think there are some questions which fit in out of my expertise area, and you probably, as a customer, you have means to raise tickets, or you can answer it on the SAP community, and there will be colleagues to answer these questions. I keep monitoring the SAP community very frequently. You can tag it to SAP Analytics Cloud, ask your question in the forum, and then we will get back to you.
There's one question here. I didn't hear you address it. Can you take the results from Smart Predict and insert it into an existing chart within a story?
I did answer that. The way to do is that you will be having a model connected to the dataset, which is an output of Smart Predict, and then it will be shown in the chart. The example that in my case I was showing was a table that shows the output of Smart Predict. I did not have to do anything other than that, other than having a model. Is Crystal Reports being deprecated? I think that's one for you, Katrina.
We do not have any plans to deprecate Crystal Reports at this time.
All right. If we're done with questions, then I'll go ahead and conclude the webinar for today. Is that okay with you, Priti?
Yeah. You don't see any new questions, right?
Yeah, I think you answered most of the questions.
Yeah, the slides will be shared for most of the questions because they are attached to the live connection support.
Yes. The slides will be shared.
Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry for saying back, but I'll just answer the last question and then we can close. The question is, feature availability in embedded analytics. Currently there are none, we are having a roadmap to offer. Not all the Smart Features, but forecasting and Smart Insights, Search to Insight into the embedded analytics, which is embedded directly into the SAP applications like SuccessFactors, S/4HANA. Otherwise, all of them are SAP Analytics Cloud Enterprise Edition already.
Thank you so much. All right. Great. Thank you so much everyone for joining our webinar today. Firstly, I'd like to say a huge thank you to Priti for her time and effort in putting this webinar together and for really giving us all a thorough presentation into Smart Features and self-service analytics. I'd also like to say a big thank you to our audience for your participation using the question box. We really did enjoy seeing all of your engagement throughout this webinar. I'd also like to mention again our survey, which you can access by clicking on the three smiley faces in the bottom widget bar. This really does help us in planning new webinars that you all would enjoy. Lastly, I also want to point out again the link in our resources box to any upcoming webinars.
We do have one more session coming up as part of this series next week, so I highly recommend that you do check that out. We will also be having two follow-up blog posts coming out from this webinar. One will be a summary blog and another will be a Q&A blog. This will be posted on the SAP community. As well, I'll be linking them in this current webinar console as well. Do keep an eye out for that. With that, I'll just close off this webinar. Thank you so much all for joining us today, and we'll see you in the next one.
Thank you everyone. Thanks, Zarmina. Thanks, Katrina. Bye.