It is key that any derived insight can be turned into an action, because without any alternate action the insight brings no value. This is what makes the SAP Analytics Cloud platform so valuable, as it combines derived insight from business intelligence with resource allocation in planning as a form of strategic decision making.

It is however not uncommon that the world of planning is separated from the world of insight generation, this can in part be due to complexity of either world where it is hard to traverse both worlds. In SAP Analytics Cloud effort also has to be undertaken to make this as intuitive as possible, functionality typically leveraged here is the Analytics Designer where business applications can be built, hiding potential complexities.

Following this line of thinking we have invested some time to create a showcase business application where What-if can be leveraged in a planning model. The built application will be able to generate Masterdata on the fly to have the user create Drivers ad-hoc, during the generation of said drivers, associated accounts are noted. This link is subsequently used to make sure driver-based business logic can be applied directly on the account structure.

Therefore, a business user needs to know no more than what drivers affect their business and what the expected impact would be to assess its financial impact. Naturally found scenario and assessment can directly be shared with other users to decide to alter the chosen strategy or not.

For a business user we have generated the below video focusing on the why and how to use the application. For the technical specialist we have created this blog and video to explain the inner workings and how to set it up for use on the SAP Analytics Cloud platform.

In the end our main goal is for our customers to use our platform to its full potential, therefore pushing applications and content like this sample content leveraging the world of Business Intelligence as well as Planning. If you are interested in content beyond this showcase we would motivate you to check out our latest high quality content on Workforce planning or the content on holistic Integrated Financial planning.