My first 5 minutes with SAP Lumira

Back when I started out in the Business Intelligence world, reporting was still quite a complex business and even getting out a basic table and chart was viewed as a sort of techno sorcery.  Over the past few years this skill has become a lot more commoditised.  Part of this is no doubt due to a more tech savvy user community and the growth in availability of ever larger data sets has also no doubt been an influence.  Enabling both however have been increasingly 'usable' visualisation tools which, using in-memory technologies, have allowed the masses to pull their data into shape.  I'm always keen to see what's new in this data visualisation space so when I read a link the other week announcing the free personal edition of SAP Lumira I was straight at the download site.

Business Objects (pre-SAP) is where I came into Business Intelligence and I've been using it's various reporting tools on and off for the past 14 years.  SAP Lumira is an interesting innovation in this space.  The personal edition is free presumably because they need to get people using it and agitating for it at work but let's not look a gift horse, etc...  I set myself a challenge to see what I could do in five minutes after the initial install (a simple four step process by the way) without searching for any sort of user guide or instructions.  This blog is a record of my achievements.



 

The launch screen is clean and welcoming with all the various components of your potential report centre listed down the left hand side - folders for data sets, visualisations, connections and a Cloud Account. There are some samples delivered with the install so I opened the first of those to get a quick look at the Design environment and a sense of what might be possible.

I know that report 'sizzle' isn't always a good thing to aim for - front page of the FT rather than The Sun is a good place to aim for in my experience - but I'm a sucker for fun visuals as much as the next guy (unless the next guy is Stephen Few) and my eye quickly fell on the array of visualisation options available.


 

All the standard options are there but I was pleased to see Waterfalls and Box Plots make their way in and, particularly, fourth along from the left, some geographic visual options.  I've struggled in the past with some of these visualising data on maps so am always keen to see an easier way.  This was going to be the centre of my five minute challenge.
So, I spent half a minute creating a very simple Excel source listing countries and a RAG code, 1,2,3 equalling Red, Amber, Green accordingly.

Then it was straight into the create New Document button at the top left of the launch screen.  The personal edition is limited to spreadsheets as a data source but it shows the various enterprise options available as well and you can see that it can report of SAP Universes, Free Hand SQL (should you prefer going off piste) and, of course, SAP HANA. That last would be an interesting test of Lumira's in memory performance perhaps? 

 

 

Once my spreadsheet source is selected, a quick preview screen appears and then the data acuqisition process is straightforward enough.

 

I suppose it's the next step that is the most technically challenging.  Defining the data SAP Lumira has ingested does require a basic understanding of what the visualisation is intended to show.  In essence, you still need to be able to identify your dimensions from your measures, your facts from your attributes.  And that's done on a column by column basis.

This Prepare Stage presents a useful interface for a basic review of the data source including some basic data profiling tasks such as the frequency of values that occur.  Right click options above each help declare a column as a measure or dimension or, in this case, a geographical hierarchy.  That was a nice straightforward addition to my experience of traditional Business Objects Universe design - even in the relatively recent Information Design Tool.  Would be good to see it taken forward to the Enterprise layer.

 

Defining a Geography Hierarchy immediately compares the values in my source with the values available to Lumira and presents a list of ambiguous or plain missing entries.

 

The screenshot above shows that it couldn't find any of the US States I'd added to my quick data source and that there were more than one option available for Guernsey Island.  Sometimes the ambiguities could be resolved against the available Lumira map and sometimes they couldn't. Hey, it was only a quick look at what could be done.

 

With my data prepared I could now look to Visualise the data.  I clicked the Visualise button and selected a geographic display.  You get three options there - a Bubble Chart, the dreaded Pie and a Chloropeth.  That was a new word for me and I wondered at the irony of the visualisation tools getting simpler but the lexicons surrounding them becoming more complex.  Basically though, it means colouring in the countries on a RAG basis. 

 

I started with the Bubble Chart and the War Games look.

 

 

Then it was a simple matter of switching to Chloropeth, defining my Reds, Ambers and Greens against their numeric values in the legend and the chart I was aiming for was done.  In five minutes.

 

 

Well, almost.  I was still a bit annoyed about not being able to breakdown the US by States so spent ten minutes on line locating a latitude longitude reference data set for US states, appended it to another for the rest of the world and then merged that, through SAP Lumira's integration capabilities with my original data set.  I was then able to recreate the report but this time using the Longitude Latitude Geographic Hierarchy option in my Prepare stage.  This didn't shade in the entire country shape but did put a little RAG coloured dot in the middle of each shape which was a fair compromise I felt. 

 

Perhaps the next stage would be to explore the SAP Lumira visualisation extension capability and work out whether it would allow the deployment of a state and country specific map?

 

Anyway, I enjoyed my return to SAP reporting and visualisation with Lumira.   It doesn't do everything - there seemed a lack of value selectors in the report interface and I can't comment on the Enterprise capabilities - at a minimum it would be good to see it refresh reports on a scheduled basis and provide full metadata lineage through Information Steward - but as the Personal Edition is a free download I can't really complain.