Using SAP Visual Intelligence to Answer Real Business Questions
An in-depth first experience with SAP Visual Intelligence
Given my blog and passion is interactive data visualization, you can imagine how excited I was when I saw Visual Intelligence for the first time. I have purposely waited to pick it up for the first time until I had a legitimate business case for it and carve out the time to document my experiences.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
I wanted to explore how our customers are utilizing GMaps Plugin page views, so we can engage heavy usage customers to gather feedback, offer help to low usage customers, and identify any problematic trends that may exist.
Here are more specific business questions I came to the table with as I discovered Visual Intelligence (VisI) for the first time
- Who are my top users this year and in the past few months?
- Who are trending upward quickly to become a top user?
- Are there any sudden spikes in usage where there could be a problem?
- Who is not making good use of their page views?
With any new insights learned from Visual Intelligence, I wanted to share my findings with my sales director so she could take necessary action.
THE DATA
I had one data set with over 50,000 records that report page broken down by license and authentication keys. This data was downloaded from our page view data database.
The second data set came from our Salesforce.com CRM, which contains all of the accounts and developer licenses.
MY FIRST GUT REACTION
The first time, I opened Visual Intelligence, the interface was pretty basic, but as I would find there is a lot of power to be unlocked within this tool.
IMPORTING AND MERGING MY DATA
Importing data was very simple since it originated from a CSV file. Merging was also quite simple as VisI actually tries to figure out which columns to merge by. An analyst or business user who is not intimately familiar with all of the data columns, would definitely benefit from this built-in intelligence.
Once the data is merged, I can see everything together in one table. A very good start!
DEFINING MEASURES
Initially, VisI does not automatically convert columns to measures, so I can go through and pick out my measures on my own. Otherwise I was able to click on a button titled “Enrich Data.” VisI will figure out all of my measures and add them to a list in the left pane.
One thing I wish the VisI team would enhance: The attributes list does not indicate which data source an attribute originated. For some users that is not important, but in my case it would have been nice to know so I chose the correct measure.
WORKING WITH TIME DATA IN VISUAL INTELLIGENCE
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