Monday, November 27, 2023

APOS Publisher for Cloud – Core Report Broadcasting Concepts

APOS Publisher for Cloud lets you get the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right format:

“Push” vs. “Pull” – Choosing the right distribution strategy
Push information out to recipients so its there where, when, and how they need it.
Dynamic Flexibility – lower IT and user burden
Handle unique and changing scenarios by controlling the data which drives the process.
Personalized Distribution – the right information to the right people
Use bursting definitions to enable data-driven broadcasting of personalized messaging.
Strategic Timing – the right time
Schedule broadcasts to arrive at strategic times for maximum impact.
Tailored Messaging – the right format
Send information in the format most useful to the recipient – Excel, PowerPoint, PDF.
Tailored Destinations – the right place
Place information in the workflows of recipients via email, FTP, SFTP, network locations.

Push vs. Pull

The default method for consuming SAP Analytics Cloud reports and analytics is “Pull.” What this means is that information consumers are pulled into the SAP Analytics Cloud system where they request or pull the stories and dashboards for viewing. For many organizations, this strategy is insufficient, because some stakeholders may not receive information in a timely manner due to their usage patterns, and because some other stakeholders do not log in to SAP Analytics Cloud at all (e.g., external stakeholders such as suppliers and customers).

These organizations require a “Push” strategy, which is what report broadcasting provides. In this strategy, information is pushed out directly to information consumers via email, or to a network file share, or to FTP or secure FTP. A Push strategy places information into the path of those who need it, when they need it, and in the format most useful to them.

Dynamic Flexibility

The information within your SAP Analytics Cloud deployment can expand and contract continuously, so bursting needs to adapt to the content. If your SAP Analytics Cloud story contains grids or tables that expand beyond what can fit into a window, scrolling should be added dynamically and ensure that the entire data set is sent and visible.

In another use case, suppose your story contains no data at a particular point in time. You should be able to specify that a story not be distributed if it is empty.

Data-driven broadcasting allows you to connect the bursting definition to a data source that dynamically drives all the properties within the definition.

Personalized Distribution

The corollary of pushing the right information to your information consumers is that they should receive only the information they need. Based on this requirement, you need to be able to personalize the Analytics you push out to those information consumers.

You can schedule stories for distribution in SAP Analytics Cloud, but personalization is labor-intensive.
Bursting is a data-driven process that allows you to “set and forget” your personalized messaging in a bursting definition. Conversely, you can make global revisions to personalized bursting by simply changing the data used in the process. Such data-driven bursting removes significant IT burden and technical debt from your Analytics distribution workflows.

Strategic Timing

A key element of Story distribution is timing. Timing can be adversely affected by volume. APOS Publisher for Cloud can be scaled to meet the challenges presented by high broadcasting volume through additional processing servers.

Simple scheduling works for regular dissemination, but what if there are special circumstances that should automatically trigger information distribution?

This is where conditional bursting comes in.

When there are business-critical KPIs in your stories, you can use conditional bursting to set thresholds on such KPIs so that, should those KPI values stray outside parameters, the people who need to know are informed automatically.

Tailored Messaging

Receiving information in the right format is as important as receiving the right information at the right time, because for many users the information delivered is just the starting point. APOS Publisher for Cloud provides extensive formatting options to allow you to provide information in the most usable format for the specific information consumer.

For example, an information consumer may choose to perform additional analysis, so it is important they receive the information as an Excel spreadsheet. If the information consumer needs to present the information to others, you can deliver it within a PowerPoint template. You can also dictate which SAP Analytics Cloud stories get placed into which slides, and even consolidate multiple pages from multiple stories into a single PowerPoint template.

Tailored Destinations

As much as we need to ensure that information consumers get the right information, we need to ensure that the data is received using the right method for them. The right method is the one that makes the information most available and timely.

That’s why APOS Publisher for Cloud includes multiple destinations to choose from when bursting SAP Analytics Cloud stories, including