By Anita Gibbings, SAP Sr Director BI Product Marketing

You know that there is plenty of money locked up in your data. But does your investment in analytics really pay off? Isn’t SAP too expensive to provide a great return on investment? The answer is a resounding ‘NO.’ In fact, Forrester Consulting found a pay-back period of under six months. Now if only all your projects had that kind of result!

You imagine what it would be like to have the right insights at your fingertips. To be able to see into the future with your real-time data and to predict the results of your decisions. The SAP BusinessObjects Analytics portfolio can get you there.

That’s why we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct in-depth interviews with four customers on the value of an SAP analytics investment. Their financial analysis found that investing in SAP BusinessObjects Analytics had a risk-adjusted 171% return on investment and a net present value of $10.24 million for a three-year analysis period. (See this infographic of the highlights.)

In addition, SAP provides a complete, unified solution of all analytics capabilities for every line of business—data discovery, visualization, planning, predictive, and governance—avoiding all the problems with the creation of silos.

So How Did These Customers Achieve Such Outstanding Results?

1)Transformative Business Process Improvement

Forrester’s results found a 60% cost savings on tasks when the customer was able to visualize the data across multiple silos and identify best practice processes. One of the customers interviewed was able to take a task that on average used to cost $10,000 down to only $4,000 and as a result achieved risk-adjusted savings of $2.4 million annually. Being able to achieve 360° transparency can enable completely re-thinking processes, find ways to innovate, and help transform your business.

2)Predictive Power

What if you could predict the future and reduce your risks and incidents by 30%? An example in the study is of a transportation company who is using their data to predict which drivers are at risk of an accident through assembling real-time risk variables. By intervening with those drivers, they have been able to reduce the number of accidents and, in risk adjusted terms, save $3.2 million annually.

In doing so, they had achieved an unexpected benefit of an additional $1.9 annual savings because driver turnover dropped due to this practice of taking care of employees. Every industry is different, but I am sure you can imagine the risks and associated costs for your industry and imagine how seeing into the future could help you mitigate those risks.

3)Self-Service Time Savings

Do you have an image of SAP as not user-friendly and agile? Well, it’s time to revisit your assumptions! Forrester Consulting found that by using SAP BusinessObjects Analytics, customers were able to reduce report creating time to 1 hour.

One customer that they surveyed pointed to saving 28,800 hours, which would be the equivalent of about 14 full-time employees. Imagine all of the additional insights and cost savings those people could find when they can visualize data so quickly.

4)Integrated Planning and Financial Consolidation

SAP offers a complete end-to-end solution that provides many benefits. If you want to read more about how companies that have integrated their business intelligence and planning actually experience far fewer problems than those using different software tools. The Forrester study discusses a company that virtually eliminated 200 hours of financial consolidation and normalization time using the SAP BusinessObjects planning functionality.

There’s a reason that SAP is the market leader in analytics with more than 65,000 customers and a brand that you can trust to deliver a solid return on your investment.

– See more at: http://blog-sap.com/analytics/2017/01/05/forrester-consulting-study-finds-171-roi-on-sap-businessobjects-analytics/#sthash.T20LOmf4.dpuf