Subject: SAP-Lumira
Category: SAP Business Intelligence / Data Integration
Article ID: 085
In today’s complex data landscape, organizations require robust tools not only for data visualization but also for efficient data integration and transformation. SAP Lumira, a powerful self-service visualization tool, when combined with SAP Data Services—a comprehensive data integration and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solution—provides a synergistic platform for end-to-end data analytics. This article explores how SAP Lumira integrates with SAP Data Services to deliver clean, consistent, and insightful data visualizations that drive informed business decisions.
¶ Understanding SAP Data Services
SAP Data Services is an enterprise-grade data integration platform designed to extract, transform, and load data from diverse sources—ranging from databases and applications to flat files and cloud sources. It ensures data quality, profiling, and governance, serving as a backbone for reliable analytics.
- Clean and Enriched Data: SAP Data Services prepares and transforms raw data into high-quality, analytics-ready datasets.
- Unified Data Sources: Integrate data from heterogeneous sources into a single view accessible to Lumira.
- Automated Data Pipelines: Schedule and automate data workflows ensuring timely data refreshes.
- Improved Data Governance: Enforce data validation, cleansing, and consistency before visualization.
- Scalability: Handle large volumes of data efficiently for enterprise-grade reporting.
- Extract data from multiple systems (ERP, CRM, legacy databases, etc.)
- Perform transformations such as joins, lookups, aggregations, and data cleansing.
- Enrich datasets by integrating reference data or applying business rules.
- Load the prepared data into a target system accessible by SAP Lumira, such as SAP HANA, SAP BW, or a relational database.
- Connect SAP Lumira directly to the target database or SAP BW where data has been processed by SAP Data Services.
- Use Lumira’s intuitive interface to import datasets.
- Create visualizations based on clean, transformed data ensuring accurate analysis.
¶ Step 3: Automate and Refresh
- Utilize SAP Data Services’ scheduling capabilities to update datasets regularly.
- SAP Lumira visualizations automatically reflect fresh data without manual intervention.
- Define Clear Data Models: Collaborate between ETL developers and BI analysts to align on data structures.
- Optimize Performance: Push transformations to the database layer where possible for efficiency.
- Monitor Data Quality: Leverage SAP Data Services’ profiling tools to ensure data integrity.
- Manage Security and Access: Secure data pipelines and limit data access based on roles.
- Document Workflows: Maintain detailed documentation for data flows and transformation logic.
¶ Benefits of SAP Lumira and SAP Data Services Integration
- Enhanced Analytics Accuracy: Clean and consistent data ensures trustworthy insights.
- Reduced Time-to-Insight: Streamlined data workflows accelerate report generation.
- Flexibility: Easily adapt to changing business requirements with modular ETL and visualization layers.
- Self-Service Analytics: Empower business users with reliable data to create their own dashboards.
A global retail company uses SAP Data Services to extract sales, inventory, and customer data from multiple ERP systems, cleanses and consolidates it into a central SAP HANA database. SAP Lumira then connects to this database to create interactive sales performance dashboards for regional managers, enabling timely and data-driven decisions.
Integrating SAP Lumira with SAP Data Services bridges the gap between raw data and actionable insights. By leveraging SAP Data Services for data preparation and SAP Lumira for visualization, organizations can build a robust analytics ecosystem that ensures data quality, consistency, and agility. This integration not only enhances the reliability of business intelligence but also accelerates decision-making processes across the enterprise.
Keywords: SAP Lumira, SAP Data Services, Data Integration, ETL, Data Visualization, SAP HANA, SAP BW, Data Quality, Business Intelligence