Association Analysis (SAP Library - Business Intelligence)

Association Analysis

Use

The purpose of association analysis is to find patterns in particular in business processes and to formulate suitable rules, of the sort "If a customer buys product A, that customer also buys products B and C".

Example

If a customer buys mozzarella at the supermarket, that customer also buys tomatoes and basil.

Association analysis also helps you to identify cross-selling opportunities, for example. You can use the rules resulting from the analysis to place associated products together in a catalog, in the supermarket, or in the Web shop, or apply them when targeting a marketing campaign for product C at customers who have already purchased product A.

Association analysis determines these rules by using historic data to train the model. You can display and export the determined association rules.

Integration

The data that you use to train the model can be taken from any other system, provided that the system can extract data into SAP BW.

Prerequisites

The queries available in SAP BW allow you to access the necessary data with which to determine association rules for the transactions concerned.

Features

You can make the following settings in a model for the Association Analysis method:

You use the model fields to specify which transactions and which items should be considered.

You can use the model parameters, for example, to specify what percentage of the transactions with the leading item (product A) should also contain the dependent item (product B or C) to define a valid rule (confidence). Coupled with this, you can use the parameters Lift and Support to improve the quality of the determined rules. Moreover, you can specify the number of leading and dependent items.

You can display the association rules determined in training and export them to an Excel workbook. If you have determined product association rules, you can export these to an SAP Customer Relationship Management System (SAP CRM) for use as product proposals for cross-selling.