Practical Data Science with SAP

Chapter 2. Data Science for SAP Professionals

Note

If you’re a data scientist, you may not need much of the information in this chapter. We’re trying to get SAP professionals up to speed on things that you probably already know.

As a SAP business analyst, Fred is always looking for process improvements. That’s his job, and he is good at it. He’s heard a lot of buzz about data science, but to him, it is just that...buzz. Data science is creating the self-driving car, beating world champions at Go, and translating languages. Fred works at a US manufacturer, and data science has no real relevance to him.

Or does it?

If Fred knew the basic concepts around data science, he would understand how it could be leveraged to provide business value. He recently worked with the product development team, which is looking to IT for help in streamlining their processes. They have lots of unorganized data. They present Fred with an idea, a dashboard to help them track their process. When Fred evaluates the project his first response is to put the data in a SQL database. Once there he can use a presentation tool like PowerBI to create a dashboard. It is a solution that everyone likes.

Fred doesn’t know the basics of data science. There are features in this data that might help the company make better, data-driven decisions. If he knew the basic concepts of regression and clustering, he would see it. He would know that he could do more with this business data than the project team requested.

Therein ...