By Nathan Dukes
Lately SAP has been coming up with some left field uses for their business intelligence offerings.
The first is 2010 Football Experience, a tool which provides users a ‘business intelligence’ style view of the FIFA World Cup.
The tool is the latest in a string of examples SAP has produced to show off the real world (as opposed to the business world) capabilities of their business intelligence solutions. Past examples include the likes of twitter based Aus Traffic.
In 2010 Football Experience, users can see statistics and dashboards relating to goals, scorers, teams, and predicted results, amongst several other statistical groups. Being a web based tool too, anyone can use the tool by registering and logging in.
The tool has three distinct sections- one each for match data, predictions, and goal history, each with their own statistics and analysis.
The first section lets you explore through 50 years worth of world cup match data, and analyse the world’s best and worse performances. Built in SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, the tool is a showcase of the power of the tool, allowing users to view the data in pie charts, graphs or lists, as they would with their own data if they purchased the software.
Want to know who scored the most goals for the USSR in the 1966 world cup? Want to know who they were scored against? This tool has the capability to provide the answer and several, several more. (It was striker Valeri Porkujan with 4 goals in the tournament, 2 against Chile, if you’re interested).
The tool offers a seemingly endless combination of statistics, and the ability to drill deep into the history of the world cup.
The second section allows you to use up-to-date insights to make your predictions for upcoming world cup matches. Users can submit their tips and compare them with the community.
After each game the tool updates your score as a success rate style figure, and compares you with other users, based on the accuracy of your predictions.
The third part is a goal analyser, which maps the position of each goal scored in every world cup since 1966 using SAP Crystal Reports.
Users can drill down by team and find a team’s strengths and weaknesses. Goals are represented by field position and net position, and graphed by distance from the net.
While the topic of the data related little to the business world, the tool is a timely showcase of SAP business intelligence solutions for anyone interested in implementing SAP BI or SAP BusinessObjects.
