SAP Analytics Cloud – Smart Insights

Most visualization tools allow you to view top contributors to a specific dimension being analyzed. What if you want to analyze the top contributors of a selected value (data point) without pivoting the data?

The Machine Learning techniques in SAP Analytics Cloud allows us to pick a data point and analyze the contributors. You can also enter a search query in natural language and get appropriate results.

Add Smart Insights

Smart Insight is a simple, easy to use machine Learning tool which discovers the top contributor of a selected data point. You can add Smart Insights to the chart either by clicking on the icon in the context menu or by selecting a data point.

Consider an example – Sales by Cities. By enabling Smart Insights, you can see that the top contributor New York is approximately 6000% above average. Also, the sales are driven significantly by Subcategory – Chairs.

Also, notice that the Average reference line is represented automatically as soon as you enable smart insights.

Smart Insight on Data Point Selection

Similarly, when you select a data point and click on the “Insights” icon you can see the smart insights for that member in a separate panel.

Consider the above example, on selecting Chicago, it shows that the Subcategory ‘Phone’ is the Top contributor which is 320% above average. You also get to know preferred shipped mode is Standard Class and it is 126% above average. One more insight is that consumer goods are doing well in Chicago.

These smart insights allow the business users to dive deep into the data and get an idea of the data which can otherwise be easily overlooked. It also helps the user to research the unexpected behavior of a data point.

Smart Insight as Chart

Smart Insights are also represented as a chart when you choose to view smart insight for a selected data point. You can even include this chart in the story using the Add as Chart option.