Variances are great for making comparisons
between versions like budget and actuals,
or between measures like revenue and expenses.
In this video, SAP Analytics
Cloud Global Product Evangelist Ingo Hilgefort
shows how to map live data from SAP BW to versions in SAP Analytics Cloud models,
and how to display variances between
measures or versions, as well as time series variances in stories.
Welcome to another video on the integration of SAP Analytics, Cloud and BW.
This time we will take a look how we can configure variances.
So first of all, we're going to use BW query and set up a model,
and important in our case,
the BW query does have a dimension to identify the different versions,
such as actual and budget, in the data.
So when we have the model,
in this case, Analytics Cloud will show us the measures.
We can save the model.
And before we continue,
we also need to configure the versions.
So in this case, we can choose which dimension does have the information.
And on the left-hand side we show the different values from BW,
and then on the right-hand side,
we can map it to the elements from SAP Analytics Cloud.
Based on that, we will then be able to create variances,
for example, of actual compared with budget.
So now we can create our story.
And the first thing we're gonna do is create a chart.
And we're going to show revenue as a measure,
and we simply do a comparison of
two measures against each other as our first variance.
So we're going to take product category,
as the dimension, and we're going to use revenue as the measure.
And then we're going to add a variance on top of
the chart and compare the revenue against the costs.
So we open up the Variance Panel, and
in this case we simply choose revenue as the measure,
and then we're going to choose another measure from
the BW query as a comparison.
So here we have already our first variance.
Now as a next step,
we're going to go in and actually compare now
two versions, such as actual with budget.
So we're going to remove the variance that we just created, we'll to to compare,
and you can already see, because SAP Analytics Cloud identified
that we have a version, it offers already a comparison of actual
versus budget. We open up the Variance Panel,
we go in and say we want to compare revenue against revenue,
and we add the version, and now
we're being offered the different versions that we configured.
So in our case,
this is actual versus budget.
Now as a last option,
we're going to take a look at variances over time.
For that, we're going to quickly create
a new model with a BW query that also has
time characteristics such as
the calendar months and the calendar day inside of the BW query.
And now we're going to take a look how we can use the
time characteristics to create the variance.
So we quickly then save the model,
and then we're going to go in,
set up a new story,
and we're going to set up a new chart.
And in this case, we're going to use the calendar day as the dimension,
and then we're actually going to configure
a new variance based on the time characteristic.
So you can see Analytics Cloud already identified
the time characteristic because it adjusted
the chart to be a column chart.
So we're going to enable the time characteristic hierarchy here.
In this case, we want to see the year,
the month, and day.
We're going to drill down to the month.
And now we're just gonna add a variants on top.
And you can see already again,
Analytics Cloud is giving us some suggestions like previous year,
previous months, and we can now configure the details.
We use the net value,
we add the calendar day as the time characteristic.
And then we can choose
different time periods that we want to compare against each other.
For example, the current period against the previous period.
We also have different display options such as an integrated bar,
we can choose between numeric variances and percentage variances,
we can configure the scale so those options are possible as soon as we have,
in this case, the time characteristics from BW,
because then we can create the variance based on
the time characteristic. For these variance options,
it's very important to take a look at the note that is being mentioned
here as there are some prerequisites for your BW system,
and it's also important that in case you want to use a time-based scenario,
for example, the calendar day,
that those dimensions are part of the BW query
and that the virtual Date and Time
hierarchies have been enabled in your BW system.
I want to say thank you for watching and listening.
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series and other SAP Analytics Cloud content. See you next time!