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Business Objects Reporting - Crystal Reports
Crystal Reports Overview
Crystal Reports is a powerful, dynamic, actionable reporting solution that helps you design, explore, visualize, and deliver reports via the web or embedded in enterprise applications. It enables end users to consume reports with stunning visualizations, conduct on-report business modeling, and execute decisions instantly from the report itself—reducing dependency on IT and developers.
Transforming data into actionable information.
Report Development - Ease of Use
When you evaluate reporting software applications you will often find an inverse relationship between ease of use and functionality. The easier reporting software is to use, the less likely it is to meet complex reporting requirements. Crystal Reports is the most widely used reporting software application and provides an unmatched correlation between ease of use and functionality, making it the primary choice for all customers reporting from all data sources. You can use Crystal Reports to develop simple reports or to address your most complicated reporting requirements. When you ask report developers about the biggest challenges of report writing, they will tell you the difficulty is not with the reporting software, but understanding which tables are required in a report and the relationships between the tables.
Crystal Reports Report Templates and Samples for JD Edwards and SAP
Due to the complexity of SAP and JD Edwards ERP data models, developing reports against these ERP's is easier said than done. The information stored inside SAP and JD Edwards is dispersed across thousands of database tables. Once you identify which tables are required for the report you are creating, you then need to understand how the tables are joined together to display accurate information on your report. Rather than storing the data with intuitive table and field names, the JD Edwards and SAP data is stored in a cryptic format that is not legible to non-technical professionals. To accelerate and simplify your ability to report from your ERP data, Preferred Strategies provides SAP and JD Edwards customers with the BI Quick Launch, a suite of report templates and samples tailored for your ERP data model. The BI Quick Launch templates identify the proper data tables by ERP module and the relationships between tables are already defined for you. To learn more about BI Quick Launch Report Templates and Samples for Crystal Reports, click here 
Business Intelligence - Data Warehouse vs Live Data Reporting
One approach to simplify the reporting process for end users is to develop a data warehouse which will mask the complexities described above. By exposing report developers to the data warehouse, they will only have access to the content that IT delivers to them. If this is a direction you choose to pursue, just beware that this approach is a much more IT intensive approach and will often times result in increasing reliance on IT resources rather than reduce them. When you weigh the IT involvement required creating, managing and supporting a data warehouse, empowering people outside IT to quickly become self-sufficient and proficient at reporting is not achievable. With a data warehouse there will always be reliance on IT to continually update and modify the content in the data warehouse to suffice new reporting requirements. If you prefer a data warehouse approach, the Preferred Strategies BI Quick Launch can be mapped to your data warehouse rather than your transactional data. If you would like to better understand the pros and cons of a data warehouse vs a live data reporting architecture, please read the Preferred Strategies whitepaper. To learn more about the Preferred Strategies Operational Data Store for JD Edwards, click here
Web-based delivery of reports
Reports are developed on a report developer's workstation and when completed, saved to a web-based intelligence platform to be accessed by users throughout the organization. If you would like to read more about the Business Objects intelligence platform click here.
Drilldown capabilities
Users are empowered to answer their own questions by drilling down and drilling through reports. This functionality will allow your managers to view reports over the web and when they see a balance off target, drill from summary information to underlying details to determine the source of the issue.
Integration of visual dashboard content
Embed interactive Xcelsius dashboard models within a Crystal Report to give your users a more graphical experience. To learn more about Business Objects Dashboards and Visualizations, click here
View-time parameters
Build more interactive reports with view-time parameters to improve the reporting experience for end users. While viewing reports online, users can update parameter values and the report will change in front of their eyes without having to go to the database to re-process the report.
Learn more about Preferred Strategies BI Quick Launch Report Templates and Samples or Business Objects Crystal Reports capabilities
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