Hello and welcome to the SAP Analytics channel.
Have you ever wondered how to build complex,
flexible processes using data actions in SAP Analytics Cloud?
Say you're working in the HR department of a telecom company. Right now,
your team is trying to keep up with the annual planning cycle.
The CFO has set an overall target for employee expenses.
Based on that, your manager has estimated that
this year's new hires and terminations will match last year's.
And she's set the average salary and car allowance for each employee.
However, the group health insurance costs are still up in the air.
The cost of the current policy has increased and
management needs to decide whether to change insurance.
And so your bosses provided the cost per employee of renewing
the current policy and started looking for the best quote from a competitor.
She'd like you to calculate the total employee expense in
each case so that she can discuss the plan with the CFO and CEO.
It's up to you to provide the data
quickly and keep the planning cycle on track.
You don't have time to do a lot of manual data entry.
Instead, you decide to use data actions and SAP Analytics Cloud to setup
complex calculations in advance
and run them when you're ready to start planning.
While you wait for the insurance, quote,
you set up three data actions.
In the first data action,
you prepare the 2021 plan data.
You need to clear existing headcount and cost data from the plan,
so you use a delete function.
You can build this step with visual editor.
The next few operations let you quickly copy data.
You copy the hires and terminations from
2020 to 2021 as your manager requested.
Then you copy the December 2020 closing balance of employee expenses to
the January 2021 opening balance In the next data action, you
calculate headcount using a carry forward function.
It adds in the hires and terminations each
month and carries the result forward to the next month.
This way, the process still works
if your boss needs to adjust the planned hires or
terminations. In the last data action,
you plan the company's 2021 employee expenses.
You multiply the average cost of base salary and
car allowance in each period by the closing headcount for the period.
The insurance cost isn't fixed yet,
so you use a parameter,
you set up the calculation so that you can leave the parameter at 0 to use
the insurance rate from the model or
type a different cost to simulate a scenario.
Once your boss provides the competitors quote,
you're ready to jump into your story.
You've added the data actions as well as
tables so that you can see the results as you go.
Keep in mind that you'd usually set up these calculations as
one data action so that you can run it with a single click.
Here they're split into steps to make the calculations clearer.
Let's run them to get the expense figures.
You start with data preparation to add
the hires and terminations from last year.
Then you calculate the headcount.
Now you can calculate the expenses.
This time you leave the insurance cost parameter at
0 to figure out the cost of renewing the current policy.
Here are the expense figures.
Next, you copy this version of the plan and calculate the expenses again
on the new version using the alternative cost from the insurance quote.
It's easy to run more scenarios in real time,
but a quick look confirms that the new quote brings
the employee expense in line with the targeted value.
You can now share it with your boss to make sure she's ready for her meeting.
By combining structured calculations with data visualization.
This story gives management everything they need to make their decision.
And the data actions that you've prepared or easy to
update and reuse for future planning cycles.
HR is just one example, too. Advanced formulas in data actions
can be used in a bunch of different scenarios like calculating depreciation,
managing cashflow, or planning activity costs.
Check out the description for more ideas and try it out today.
Our free trial now includes planning features.