SAP Lumira Reviews

The ability to upload a spreadsheet and immediately start using it. It's more intuitive than a pivot table because you can dump a spreadsheet in it and it sort of figures out what relationships work and what relationships don't. I think it helps for people who aren't necessarily predisposed to inherently grasping data.

It gave me the ability to see things that I otherwise wouldn't see from a pivot table.

I think probably what I was trying to do at the time was create some sort of map if you will. I work a lot with freight data, transportation data and I've been trying to find a solution to show volumes and distances out of a specific point so if we've got a distribution center in Dallas, Texas, something that I can just drop the data in and by zip code it will show you know a heat map of the zip codes that we're shipping to and don't recall the mirror being able to do that.

I went in there for a couple of hours one day and just explored.

I didn't experience any issues with the performance.

I was testing it so I didn't need to scale it.

Most of what I do is in Excel and Access. So Lumira and the other options I looked at were really to supplement that rather than to replace anything else that I was using.

I seem to recall it being pretty simple.

It seemed to be fairly user friendly. I've also done trials on Tableau and Spotfire before and I would say I had limited interactions with both of those as well, it's probably on par with both of those as far as being able to get in there and use it without a whole lot of you know training and tutorials and that sort of thing. It's pretty user friendly from what I recall, but I just didn't really get down into the real details of it.

It was comparable to the other solutions that I looked at as far as being able to just get in there and dump some data in and go.

The ability to render and visualize data across time or organizational hierarchies. It provides better, more robust ability to visualize data than in Excel or some of the other desktop tools that are out there, providing users the ability to identify actionable trends in their data sets that they normally wouldn't see, like in a spreadsheet or tabular data, a report.

It's a little bit less of a dashboard, and more of a discovery tool within the data, being able to slice and dice your data in various ways and then render that visually, rather than within a strict spreadsheet.

We can visualize the data across different timelines, across different organizations. Whatever way you're trying to look at it, you can see the trends a little bit easier than you can in its specific data points in a spreadsheet.

We use it for things like planning major holidays, looking at resources required by hour based on things like traffic or sales or other important events that we may need to take into consideration. We can also provide some executive guidance on sales trends and forecasted results for the end of the day, the end of the week. We use it for a little bit of short term forecasting from time to time.

I would say a better integration with the Business Objects platform. To develop the views, it's not user friendly. It's a great tool for developers to create the information model for Lumira. Once that has been developed then it's easier for the users to then go in and manipulate the data that's within that view, but it's not a great tool for the end user to poll data, to cleanse data, to merge data. All that, it's much better for a developer tool, but for the end users to then dynamically interact with it once the developer had built the framework for it.

I don't see that this would add a lot of value to our buyers. But for store operations, looking at how things have been running in the stores, it could be a good tool. People that are interested and have a passion for analyzing data, this is a great tool for them. Again it's not a tool for everybody, and not a tool for probably most senior executives. It is a pretty analytical tool and it requires that kind of mind set, either on the business side or on the IT side.

I've used it for three years.

The updates are easy, they get pulled down directly from SAP. I haven't personally encountered any bugs or defects within it.

We haven't had any issues.

It's not a tool for the entire enterprise. It's a tool for people that are used to doing data analysis, so financial planners, inventory or merchandise planners.

6/10 - I haven't really had to reach out to SAP much for any support on it.

We use Webi but people wanted to see was really columnar data. I started using Lumira to try and demonstrate different methods to render some of the same data in ways that would expose trends that weren't obvious within a spreadsheet or within Webi. Once I started doing that I got some other departments interested in viewing data the same way.

The installation initially of the client was very straight forward. I did it myself. As far as if you have HANA you can't install it on HANA, but the integration with Business Objects directly is still not great. It's better as a client on people's desktops than on a server based component. For me that's a little bit of a limitation that's been challenging. It does make it a little less appealing to roll out for the entire enterprise.

I would say expect to do a number of proof of concepts for various departments before finding a successful partner to implement with. As a client it's great, as an application, I would expect as an application with Business Objects, that integration is still not great. From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting. But as a client it's awesome.

The connection almost covers our main RDBMS and SAP products. Users can fix, operate datasets, and build a story on top of it. Especially for HANA live and HANA offline connections, its performance is pretty good and operate data live. What impresses me most are the charts and graphs, geo map, the integration with ESRI, and the third part of designing geo maps. What’s more, you can integrate with other third party APIs and design your own charts. Last but not least, you can publish not only a dataset, but also the whole storyboard to cloud, BIP, and the Lumira server, which makes it easy for your team to share, view and edit.

I would say Lumira is very user friendly and easy to learn for a business analyst and their clients. It removes dependency on IT, and a business can sometimes build their own story from a dataset. That’s a huge improvement for our organization.

It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources. Also, the publishing and sharing integration with BIP and other cloud products needs work.

I've been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We've experienced no issues with performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

This product is amazing and changes how people think of the relationship between IT and businesses. It makes processes easier and faster and enables businesses to know exactly what they need so that their storyboard becomes more accurate and easy for them to present.

The number one feature would probably be the geo map feature. I like it because my consultant company is starting to get a lot of business in the healthcare industry, and that's something that they like to see. They like to see their data spread out on a map. That's the direction that they're starting to go in, and Lumira offers you the ability to do that.

We're starting to get a lot more demo requests. We can create a demo for the client really easily in Lumira, because it's quick and easy and it's just drag and drop. Up until Lumira we were using Design Studio which takes a lot more coding and work to actually create something. It's an easier tool to use.

The ability to bring in a Lumira application inside of another SAP tool like Design Studio. I don't know if that's offered yet. Whatever you create in Lumira, it would be nice to have the option to import it into Design Studio or Webby, or vice versa.

I know for the geo map you have to have an account with Esri. It would be good if you have the license for the tool, you don't have to have a separate account with Esri for the geo mapping. It should be combined into one license.

I've used it for about a year.

We've had no issues with the performance.

Most of the data I've uploaded has been simple data, simple columns. I haven't had any data with any issues yet.

I haven't had to reach out to anybody for technical support.

It's one of the newer tools that SAP offered. It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy. It speeds up the process.

It was pretty simple. You download it, you extract a folder, and you run through the steps.

I feel like something's missing, but I can't put my hand on it what's missing, if that makes sense. It's a great tool though.

Ability to quickly and easily create visualizations with large datasets.

We’ve created several dashboards that display large sets of data in an insightful and easily digestible way.

Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents.

It also needs more functionality when creating visualizations (basic functionality exists; would like ability to do more complex functions).

It additional could use greater ability to manipulate data in the Prepare tab.

I've used it for one year.

There have been no deployment issues.

At times, Lumira will crash and/or the save function doesn’t work. These seem to happen when the program has been open for a long period of time (several hours).

Lumira doesn’t handle large datasets well. I needed to bring in multiple years’ worth of data recently, but was unable to due to the size of the dataset.

Technical support is good. I contacted SAP about an issue on a Friday afternoon and was able to speak with an SAP rep on Monday morning. The matter was not resolved, but SAP was very responsive over a period of several days.

We had no previous solution was in place.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I wasn’t involved in the decision. A key decision maker in my organization uses Tableau and raves about it. I believe we went with Lumira since it was part of the SAP product stack and thus complemented our existing SAP tools.

Choose a few people to become super users with Lumira (one business user and one technical user), and allow them to champion the product and teach others what they’ve learned. Watch YouTube videos!

I like the integration, so it's easy to integrate different data sources. Then you can play with the data in the first screen that basically turns it into a table. I like that, that I can integrate multiple sources of data.

To be honest, the way I function, I'm not sure it has improved the organization. I work for an SAP third-party vendor, so I got my Lumira license through my company. Basically, we use it because it's an SAP product and we have a certain amount of licenses for our company. I use it as a tool to visualize some data about SAP, so actually, I typically only use it for presentations. To some extent, it has improved them.

An area of improvement, for sure, is the flexibility of the visualization. Often, my clients want us to see the data in a very specific way, maybe with their color palettes or whatever they want to see. Lumira is not very flexible when it comes to the color palette, or even being able to sort of like change the axes so that I want to see data in a different order. I want to see the bars in a different order, things like that. It's harder to manipulate than if I were to use Excel, where it's very simple to manipulate that kind of thing.

Lumira is a little bit more what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but if you need to change it substantially, I still go back to Excel.

The first time I used it was about a year and a half ago. I use it pretty infrequently. I don't use it every day, but yeah, I've been using it for about a year and a half.

It's a bit slow. It seems to be a bit of a hog on resources, but overall, I've never had it crash. I have heard that it has crashed when you pull in big data sets, but typically, I don't pull in very big data sets. Maybe I only have a thousand records. I've never experimented with a million records or two million records, or other loads that might be a better test of its stability.

I haven't had any scalability issues because I've never really really leveraged the tool for very, very large data. I've only ever used the tool for its visualizations with small data sets, a thousand records or less.

I've never reached out to Lumira customer service. Overall, I'm happy with their releases. Their releases seem to be come out fairly frequently. New releases always seem to improve it, but I've never spoken to the customer service directly.

The setup was very straightforward. I installed it, I registered the license, and then I was up and running within a few minutes. It really wasn't very hard to set up.

I've used Tableau before. I like Tableau. The company I work for now doesn't have a license for Tableau, and they have a license for Lumira. I wanted to leverage Lumira for the same functions as Tableau. I would say that, to be honest, it's not quite the same level.

My rating is because I see the potential that it has for the business user. I don't think it's quite at the point where it's flexible enough to be a stand-alone data visualization tool, the only one you use, because, as I've mentioned, I still use Excel. I use Excel more than I use Lumira for some specific reports and similar tasks, but I often find myself using Lumira for some of the fancier reports. For example, the geographical and other reports that Excel doesn't do quite as well. I see that it has a lot of really great tools, but it's not flexible enough for to use day-to-day.

We use Lumira to develop dashboards and discovery needs and visualize data needs.

Managers need to have interactive dashboards, and SAP Lumira has allowed us to develop dashboards for their discovery needs. And after we deploy these dashboards into Launchpad BI, we can schedule their publication or execution and send it to the manager's email.

The best feature is the ease of developing dashboards.

Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow. Even with 128GB of RAM on our server, the execution time is still slow.

I've been using this solution for six years.

Lumira performs well.

Lumira is scalable - we can deploy a cluster with different nodes and deploy features on different nodes.

SAP's technical support do a good job and always respect the incidents.

The initial setup is easy, taking between two to four hours to deploy on the server side and then another hour on the client side.

I would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel. I'd give Lumira a score of nine out of ten.

We like the idea of being able to tell a story about our data and do some ad hoc data mining. It was like doing some dashboarding to show the sales across territories and actually see which ones were performing better than other ones and see which ones were outperforming. It was kind of an eye-opener.

We knew which stores were selling a lot, but we didn't know that they were actually outperforming all the other stores. When we were able to visualize it, it actually drove that home, and we were able to do that on the fly. It took a very short amount of time for us to do that, where someone goes through and spends time doing financial reporting and stuff along those lines, but they're typically usually using old technology (Excel) and it takes them a week to put that together. Within an hour or so, we had actually a better visualization of the data.

I would look at the geospatial part of it which doesn't seem work well as when you look at converting that for your maps, it a little cumbersome, and it's not as accurate. It doesn't seem to do it as accurately so it's needs to be done manually. It's more of the data prep part of it.

We've been using it for a couple months.

It seems to be stable. It had some in-crashing and sometimes it locked up on me. It's been a little slow crunching the data, but we're not running it on a HANA database, we're running it on a traditional system, so it's a little slower.

The more workload you throw, it seems to slow down, but that's typical for data mining.

When I was first getting started I was sending emails to tech support and they were quick at getting back, so they were pretty awesome with that. I was trying to connect it and do some of that type of stuff to our BW system, and they were really quick in responding. I would say they were doing a good job. Instead of calling them, I would send them an email, and within five - ten minutes I got a response back.

We also use SAP Business Objects, and we were using some other products like Explorer and we know that Lumira was on the cutting edge, but we've had some other people looking at another product called Tableau. We're a SAP house, so we thought that it would be better to stick with the SAP tools, and that Lumira's a much more robust tool, so we are looking at moving forward with it and rolling it out to our end users.

It was really straightforward. All you have to do is go and say that you want to connect, and you have to download some .DLLs, and once they're in place, you're connected. It's pretty straightforward. That's why we're looking at allowing some people to do their ad hoc reports, or visualization of data without contacting IT services.

I think the simplicity of putting it together or being able to visualize the data is the best thing, because once it's connected, it's drag-and-drop. You can then create your storyboards and it's pretty straightforward. If you're familiar with using any kind of program or tool, it's pretty straightforward to get the results that you need.

The only problem I had was just getting some of the data prepped. I would say they need to focus on getting that type of stuff improved.

You have to prep your data, and sometimes you have to change your field types, especially if you take your zip code and you try to convert that into geospatial so you can do a display of your sales on a map. It's not as straightforward as it could be, and it doesn't quite do a good enough job. You might be in the right state, but you may not be in at quite the right location. It's still better, it's still good, but there could be some more improvement there.