Real-time analytical capability that is already included in your S/4HANA licence. S/4HANA ships with over 4,000 SAP-delivered CDS views covering Finance, Procurement, Sales, Manufacturing, Inventory and HR — each designed as an analytical view with KPI definitions, drill-down capability and authorisation controls. These views power pre-built Fiori analytical apps (KPI tiles, Overview Pages, Analytical List Pages) that your users can access immediately after activation. Most organisations that are not using Embedded Analytics are either unaware of the scope of pre-delivered content or did not enable the analytical Fiori apps during implementation. Our Analytical Content Assessment maps SAP's delivered views and apps to your business KPI requirements and identifies what can be activated immediately versus what needs custom CDS development.

A CDS (Core Data Services) view is a virtual data model defined in ABAP that creates an analytical layer on top of S/4HANA database tables. It defines which fields are measures (revenue, quantity, amount), which are dimensions (company code, plant, customer), how tables relate to each other (associations) and what authorisation rules apply. CDS views are the foundation of all S/4HANA analytics — Fiori tiles, embedded reports and SAC live connections all consume CDS views. SAP delivers 4,000+ standard views covering most common analytical scenarios. Custom CDS views are needed when: your KPI definitions differ from SAP's standard, you have custom table fields that need to appear in analytics, you need calculations or aggregations not covered by standard views, or you want to combine data from standard and custom tables. Our approach: start with standard views, identify gaps through the assessment and build custom views only where genuinely needed.

When properly designed, no — HANA's in-memory architecture is specifically built to handle analytical and transactional workloads simultaneously on the same database. This is S/4HANA's core architectural advantage over ECC, which required a separate BW system precisely because the database could not handle both. However, poorly designed CDS views can cause performance problems: deeply nested view stacks (views calling views calling views), missing authorisation optimisations, overly broad queries without filters and complex calculated fields evaluated at runtime. These are design problems, not platform limitations — and they are fixable. Our CDS development follows HANA-optimised design patterns from the start, and our performance optimisation service diagnoses and remediates views that were built without performance consideration.

Yes — this is the recommended consumption pattern for executive-level analytics on S/4HANA data. SAC connects to S/4HANA via live connection, consuming CDS views annotated with @Analytics.query: true. The same CDS views that power your Fiori KPI tiles feed SAC dashboards — one data model, consistent numbers, real-time data. SAC adds capabilities that Fiori embedded analytics cannot provide: cross-story drill-down, AI-powered Smart Insights, natural language queries (Just Ask), planning integration and mobile-optimised executive dashboards. The practical architecture: Fiori Embedded Analytics for operational users who work inside S/4HANA all day, SAC for executives and analysts who need a broader analytical canvas. We configure both as part of our standard Embedded Analytics engagement.

During — ideally. Embedded Analytics relies on the same configuration decisions being made in the S/4HANA implementation: chart of accounts structure, cost centre hierarchy, profit centre design, custom field extensions and authorisation model. When the analytics team is involved during implementation, CDS views are designed in alignment with the functional configuration — and KPI tiles are available on the Fiori Launchpad from day one of go-live. When analytics is added after implementation, there is always a gap: the analytics team discovers that the functional configuration does not expose the data they need, or that custom fields were not included in analytical CDS annotations. This gap is fixable but adds cost and delay. 2iSolutions delivers both as one team — which is why our S/4HANA go-lives include working KPI tiles on the Fiori Launchpad from day one.