Sailing Analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship

In business, we often talk about the difference between efficiency (“doing it right”) and effectiveness (“doing the right thing”). And in today’s fast-changing markets, there’s often a tradeoff involved, where if you optimize any particular measure in the short term you may suffer in the longer term (e.g. if you optimize profitability by not investing in new products).

In sailing, as in business, there are many measures to take into account, and top performance is achieved by attaining the optimal mix. For example, when you’re sailing upwind, there’s a tradeoff between direction and speed. If you sail too close to the wind, you’ll go slowly. If you sail too far off the wind, you’ll go faster, but over a longer distance. The most effective course is between the two, where the combination of boat speed and direction generate the most windward velocity (“velocity made good”).

SAP has a great deal of experience helping with business analytics, and now the SAP BusinessObjects team are using that expertise to create a first set of sailing analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark.

For example, the Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius) visualization below shows the leader board of the fifth race. For each leg, the top ten boats are shown, with the time each arrived at the mark after the leader. The top bar allows you to change the icon size and color based on different criteria. By benchmarking their performance against others, the sailors can get insight into their performance.

For example, in the view above, we can see that crew of Napier and Cram in boat GBR 8701 came in 7th for the fifth leg (tacking upwind to the windward mark). But what’s interesting is that they achieved a higher top speed (6.21 km/h) than the #2, #3, #4 and #5 boats (the color and size of each icon shows the relative top speed compared to the other boats. So, as in the example above, the problem may be that they are sailing just a little too far off the wind compared to the leading boats (although of course sail racing is a lot more complicated than this simple example, and wind shifts, currents, and the tactical maneuvers of the other boats all play a huge part).

Here’s a selection of the analyses available on the analysis page of the official SAP 505 World Championship site:

	The Race Analysis Dashboard provides you with a quick view of the Leader Group and allows for comparison across several key measures at each Mark Rounding point. Using information like Velocity Made Good and Distance Traveled, sailors and spectators alike can put the knowledge behind the data to see which tactics were the leading ones on this day. Is it better to travel further into clean wind to gain speed, or does a tighter course bring the advantage in today’s conditions? Let’s find out together…. Race 2 Race 3 Race 4 Race 5
	The Leader Comparison Report gives the user the ability to compare key metrics across the Top 10 Racers for that Race. Comparing things such as Distance Travelled and Leg Time provides a quick view of how one team compares to the others in this group. Did they sail more distance in order to gain more speed with clean wind? By comparing these key statistics in the Leader Group, we begin to see the results of tactics and strategies and begin to understand the continuous refinement happening on the course. Open Leader Comparison Report
	Race Information Dashboard gives general information about the race, the competitors and the standings to date. See the current positions for the team members representing your home country as you become more hooked on 505 Racing! Open Race Information Dashboard

And here’s a bonus Xcelsius dashboard I put together that lets you find photos of the sailors and boats, by bow number, sail number, helm name, crew name, or country:

Improving Business Performance and Improving Sports Performance: Not So Different

SAP BusinessObjects has lots of experience of helping organizations access information and use it to increase performance — here’s a quick video of how we’re using that experience:

As part of the sponsorship of the SAP 5O5 World Championship in Aarhus, Denmark, a crack team of SAP BusinessObjects experts is working hard in the control tower to turn their business expertise into a custom sailing analytics experience.

It turns out that there are a lot of parallels with real-world business BI:

• There’s lots of data available – all of the 5O5 boats are equipped with sophisticated GPS trackers from TracTrac – but the data needs to be transformed before it’s useable for analysis. There’s a lot of heavy lifting required behind the scenes: information has to be combined from multiple sources in different formats and trigonometry is used to calculate the speeds and distances from the raw GPS locations and time stamps. These calculations are then used as the basis for the more sophisticated measures that sailors really care about, such as “velocity made good” (basically, how fast you’re going towards to the next mark).
• Once you have the data, it needs to be presented in a way that makes sense. Like regular business people, most sailors are not deep number-crunchers – they’d like to see useful information displayed in a simple, intuitive way, as graphically as possible. There’s always a choice of different visualizations possible, and technical expertise isn’t enough: the team is working with sailors on exactly what interfaces would be the most effective.
• It’s not really the performance of a particular boat that’s useful: it’s only when you can benchmark your performance against the competition that you can really start increasing your performance. The team are working on ways of presenting the data that can help every competitor see how their actions compared to the best-in-class sailors.

The team are onsite to provide the sailors with information to improve their performance, but also to learn from them: it’s always useful to get a fresh perspective and new set of eyes on familiar problems.

To see the results of their work, check in on the official SAP 5O5 World Championship web site later this weekend.

In the meantime, here’s some photos to give you a taste of the event:

An Introduction to the SAP 5O5 World Sailing Championships 2010

There seems to be a connection between enterprise software billionaires and sail racing. Larry prefers the bigger boats, while Hasso prefers getting wet:

For Plattner, sailing two man dinghies and jumping off his 505 into chest-high water to prevent it from getting racked on the beach at Crissy Field is a far cry from having a professional crew guide a Farr 40 or his MaxZ yacht into a slip at Porto Cervo or another yachting Mecca. ‘The 505 is a great boat and it offers the most competitive racing available. I love the 505,’ said Plattner.

‘Hasso Plattner and Peter Alarie (GER) Race 9, 2007 SAP 5O5 World Championships’ Sail-World.com /AUS ©

If you don’t know anything about 5O5 racing, a video is available that gives a great overview of last year’s 5O5 World sailing championship in San Francisco, including Hasso’s team:

SAP sponsors the event, and provides competitors with access to information that helps them understand their performance, and how it compares to the other teams. Here’s a interview with US 5O5 sailors earlier this year, on the impact of SAP solutions on their racing:

In particular, last year’s competitors had access to SAP BusinessObjects dashboards packed with information about the conditions of each race:

Ryan Goodman explained in a blog post last year  how they were created, using a a combination of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius), and the Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin:

“Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 5O5 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.”

“Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.”

The video below from SAP TV explains the solution in more detail:

Business Intelligence software and sailing – two worlds apart? Not at the SAP 5O5 world championship. For the first time ever, SAP is contributing solutions from the SAP Business Objects portfolio to support sailors. An exciting demonstration of the similarities of business and sailing.

This year’s pre-worlds championships started this week in Aarhus, Denmark. There will be 120 teams from 11 different nations attending and Joe King and his crack team of BusinessObjects technology experts are already on site, working on supporting the sailors’ analytic needs.

The official championship starts on Friday the 30th, and you will be able to follow the action live on the official SAP 5O5 World Championship 2010 web site: http://www.505sapworldchampionship2010.com/, and access the dashboard using the “SAP Analysis” button on the left hand side:

New Augmented Corporate Reality BI Prototype

Based on a blog post and proof-of-concept application earlier this year, I have been championing a SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center project to build an “augmented corporate reality” prototype.

The idea stemmed from one of the key themes of my BI future directions presentations: that for the first time in centuries, new technology comes from the consumer world, not from governments and businesses, and so we need to adapt and adopt these technologies for corporate use.

The mobile telephone is starting to become a “universal pointing device”: using the phone’s GPS location and compass, it knows where you are, and what you’re looking at. There is now a wide range of augmented reality mobile applications available on the market that help people find the nearest pizzeria, get information about a monument, or locate local twitter users.

How could this functionality be used in the business world? My first proof-of-concept blog post imagined examples of a manager getting information about a particular retail operation, a factory foreman getting maintenance records of machinery, and comparing sales between two different areas of a retail store.

These examples spurred a lot of conversations with customers around the globe about possible applications:

• An oil company interested in getting information about equipment in refineries
• A car manufacturer interested in providing information to managers of sales dealerships
• A consumer goods company interested in tracking information and location of their vending machines

Based on those conversations, we have been able to validate the core concepts and refined the functionality of our prototype. The result is an iPhone / iPad application that works closely with the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer technology and the BI onDemand web site.

Before I tell you more about it, let me emphasize: it’s a prototype, not a product. The SAP BusinessObjects innovation center is modeled on Google Labs. We’re taking a transparent, Web 2.0 approach to innovation. Rather than working for years in some dark room and then unveiling a completed product, the team creates iterative prototypes and make them freely available for download, so that you can test them, use them, and give us feedback. They’re free, but not supported, and we give no guarantees that they will be developed further. The idea is that not-so-good ideas sink without wasted development, while good ideas get refined before turning into real products (our track record is very good: mobile BI, the Explorer product, and many features of the current BusinessObjects platform all started off as prototypes).

And please note that everything I mention below may change over time, based on your feedback. We are in the process of refining the prototype, and hope to make it available for you to download and use in the next few weeks or months.

How it works

You upload a data set that includes Point of Interest (POI) information to the BusinessObjects OnDemand platform at bi.ondemand.com (you can sign up for a free account), set some data configuration options, then access that data set from your iPhone or iPad. The prototype works out what information to display based on your location and the phone’s compass heading:

The prototype uses five fields of information to define the “points of interest” (POIs) that can be viewed: latitude, longitude, name, an associated image, and at least one data value.

Demonstration Screen Shots

First we install the Augmented Reality Explorer application (currently, this involves a specific build for identified devices – we will make it a free download from the Apple App Store as soon as we can). We then open up the application on the iPhone, and log into a BI OnDemand account:

We choose an appropriately-configured data source. The points of interest are then automatically displayed based on your location: you can choose to see either the closest POI first, or the one closest to the direction you are pointing your phone. The icons are configurable — in this case, I’m using them to indicate the current state of sales: the arrow indicates whether current sales are larger than the previous period, and the color indicates whether the current sales are above, equal to, or below the current sales targets.

We can choose to display the points on a map, and zoom in to get more detail by tapping on the radar to make it full screen, and sliding a finger to choose the radius of distance we’re interested in:

I can also view the points of interest superimposed on the real world, using the iPhone’s camera – as I move around, each POI seems to hover over its physical location, and I can choose what information is displayed as each point is selected:

At any time, I can choose to filter the points by any of the dimensions available in the data set, and clicking on a POI takes me through to the same interface as the BusinessObjects Explorer application. Any filters that are applied in the augmented reality view are applied to the Explorer view, and vice-versa, so I can easily and simply explore the information available (and it could be many millions of rows of data, if you’re using SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Accelerated)

And the prototype looks great on the iPad, too (the camera view is not available, obviously):

Other thoughts:

• The possible uses are currently limited by the precision of the location services of the iPhone/iPad (GPS, cell tower triangulation, wifi triangulation). It works very well outdoors with GPS, but using cell-towers only tells you where you are within a few blocks (which is good enough to locate the nearest retail branch, but not for comparing one aisle of a supermarket with another). Various companies such as SkyHook and Cisco are working on increasing the available precision.
• The Augmented Explorer prototype can also directly access a corporate Explorer server, with an appropriately formatted data set
• The BusinessObjects data quality solutions include location coordinates for just about any address in the world. In an ideal world, you’d be able to submit a file with addresses, and we’d turn it into coordinates on the fly, and that’s something we’ll be looking into in the future. In the meantime, there are other free solutions out there.
• Note that the locations that you’re looking at don’t have to be static: imagine pointing your device to get information about cars, trucks, or people (e.g. combining it with information from the Social Network Analyzer prototype). In the short term, data latency getting information into Explorer would be an issue, but better BI on event information will improve this area, too…

Next steps:

If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, or feel like you have a good case for getting a copy of the application even before we post it to the App Store (e.g. you’re an SAP employee with a customer who might be interested), feel free to contact me or the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center team directly. We’re particularly interested in finding real-world scenarios for this (it’s not about doing something just for the sake of the technology).

Early press coverage:

• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 8, 2010
• Q&A: Timo Elliott, BI evangelist at SAP, Jennifer Scott, IT Pro, July 9, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, TechCentral (Ireland), July 12, 2010
• SAP working on augmented reality for business, Leo King (Computerworld UK), Network World, July 9, 2010

Antivia Xcelsius Business Intelligence Dashboard with Web Intelligence Drill

In an earlier post, I showed you can use BusinessObjects products like Xcelsius, Explorer on a mobile phone, and drill through to Web Intelligence running on the bi.ondemand.com BI-in-the-cloud platform.

This post takes things one step further, with the help of SAP BusinessObjects partner Antivia. They have a great add-on solution called XWIS that makes it easier to access real-time Web Intelligence (soon to be called “Interactive Analysis”) directly from an Xcelsius dashboard.

The XWIS solution makes it easier to create dashboards containing live Web Intelligence data, complete with the ability to create new Web Intelligence queries without leaving the dashboard interface.

You can see various demonstrations of their product on their web site:

Mark Hudson, the founder of Antivia, provided me with a sample file formatted for a mobile device, and I can confirm that it’s a also great solution for mobile dashboards. Here’s a short video demonstration of the XWIS interface in action, on a Google Nexus One mobile phone running the latest version of Android, which supports Adobe Flash technology.

Here’s a more in-depth demonstration, showing off some of the key Antivia features (which also work, of course, on any regular PC that runs Adobe Flash). On the home page, I set up a browser bookmark (NOT an application) that calls a standard web page containing  the Antivia Xcelsius dashboard:

The dashboard is an Adobe Flash file, so I hold my finger on the screen for a few seconds to get the option to open it in full screen mode. The result: an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard, with live data from a BusinessObjects Web Intelligence server:

Antivia makes it easy to set up interactions such as drill down to the next level:

Here’s what you get if you click on the “product analysis” button – you can of course use all the different Xcelsius graphical representations: pie charts, sparklines, etc. etc.

Clicking on a slice of the pie chart to get more details works perfectly on the mobile device:

In this section, I can drill down two levels and the rest of the model automatically updates:

The really powerful part is the ability to create complete new queries on the fly. I simply click on the “My Analysis” button, and create a new view:

The Antivia Xcelsius plugin makes it easy to provide a fully-fledged Web Intelligence query panel, directly within my Xcelsius Dashboard:

I can create any new question I want against the data warehouse, dragging and dropping my business terms that I want to see:

I can highlight objects and change their properties (aggregate as sum, average, etc.)

I can add new conditions and filters:

And I can add sorts:

To get the results, I simply click on the “view” button in the top right, to send it to the server, where it is converted to the SQL required to query the database, using the BusinessObjects semantic layer technology. The results are then brought back and displayed within the dashboard:

At any time, I can go back to the query definition — for example, in order to make it a crosstab (there’s also a “tree” option available, but this was the only Antivia feature I could find that didn’t seem to work correctly with the (beta) mobile version of Flash)

And here are the results in cross-tab format:

So, there you have it: a great solution that leverages any investment you’ve already made in Web Intelligence, and already works extremely well in mobile environments. Please contact Antivia if you’d like more information.

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