Whitepaper - Tableau and S/4HANA Analytics

The purpose of this whitepaper is to educate you about Tableau’s integration with SAP’s S/4HANA product and to help optimize the experience of using Tableau and S/4HANA together for analytics.

Considerations for S/4HANA and ERP analytics

SAP announced 2027 as the end of life for its legacy ERP applications, mandating customers migrate to S/4HANA, its integrated ERP system. SAP S/4HANA is the successor of SAP R/3 and SAP ERP and is described by SAP as an intelligent, integrated ERP system that runs on their in-memory database, SAP HANA. An important feature of S/4HANA is its ability to support transactions and analytics in the same database.

However, the capability of supporting both analytics and transactions comes with a cost. SAP recommends that embedded analytics should only be leveraged to support fact-driven process handling and embedded decision support inside of transactions. In other words, doing analytical processing directly in S/4HANA should only be done in support of transactional workflows.

Find the right solution with Tableau and S/4HANA

At Tableau, we value our customers’ access to their data, wherever it resides. Many of our customers have invested in SAP, and we continue to work closely with SAP to ensure our connectivity and integration meets the needs of our shared customers.

Customers can use Tableau to augment the pre-delivered analytical content provided by SAP for their S/4HANA deployment via the creation of targeted dashboards and reports. To enable analytics and data discovery and ensure the smooth-running operation of S/4HANA, data must be replicated from S/4HANA into a separate reporting environment.

There are several approaches for this process, depending upon factors such as cost, database size, corporate standards, and more. In this paper, we'll discuss:

• Integrating BW/4HANA enterprise data warehouse with S/4HANA and using Tableau's HANA connector to consume SAP HANA's Calculation Views
• Replicating data into a separate HANA database to address targeted operational reporting requirements
• Creating Tableau Hyper extracts for analyzing operational data from SAP
• Leveraging a third-party database system (like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, or another)
• Additional considerations—including licensing

Please download the whitepaper to continue reading.