Chapter 10. Bringing it all Together
As more and more reporting tools are made available for Enterprise Resource Planning tools such as Dynamics GP, it becomes more of a challenge for us to select the right tool for a given circumstance. Every organization has a unique set of requirements when it comes to analyzing its data, and our goal should be to ensure that we select the right tool to meet those requirements. Additionally, each tool has its trade-offs, and we must always be aware of these trade-offs while we are selecting a reporting tool to meet our needs. In the end, we don't want to try and fit the proverbial square peg in a round hole as by forcing a reporting tool to meet challenges that simply don't align well with the strengths of that tool.
In this chapter, we'll answer some of these questions about selecting the right tool to meet our challenges by:
Looking back at what we've covered
How often do we try to force a reporting tool to meet a challenge for which it is not well suited? For example, it's not uncommon to witness a user who exports a Sales Transaction SmartList containing thousands of rows into Excel, then uses Excel formulas to summarize the values from that record-set, plugs the end-result into a single cell into yet another spreadsheet, only to have to repeat this process for several other values. All of this for a single Summary Sales Report by Division that's out of date the minute the data is exported to Excel! Rather than continue to waste productive hours watching a SmartList export to Excel on a regular basis, it may be time to consider other reporting tools such as Excel Reports—which refresh SmartList data directly to Excel or Analysis Cubes, which provides support for Excel based dashboards—to meet the needs of our report user.
In the end, our goal with this book has been to reduce potential frustrations that are...
Viewing our reporting tools in light of reporting challenges
Now that we have given a brief overview of what has been covered this far, we now turn our attention to reviewing our reporting tools in light of the challenges that we covered in the first chapter. Hopefully, you noticed in Chapter 1 that each challenge contains diametrically opposing conditions. For example, as we consider the intended audience of our report, we must decide if our report should meet the needs of day-to-day operations personnel, or if we are trying to satisfy external stakeholders. In comparing two reporting tools side-by-side, we may discover that one reporting tool perfectly meets the set of requirements imposed by our day-to-day operations personnel, whereas the other tool is more suited for external stakeholders. Other tools, we might find, fit somewhere more towards the middle of these two extreme conditions.
Our goal, then, is to select the reporting tool that has the best capability to meet our required...
The future of reporting for Dynamics GP
Before we bring this book to a close, let's pause and consider the future of reporting for Dynamics GP. In our very first chapter, we covered three major trends in reporting:
We expect (and hope) that future reporting in Dynamics GP will be geared towards these trends. GP continues to enable users to work smarter, and in a more productive fashion. New releases of GP bring with them enhancements to reporting, and GP users from top-to-bottom continue to expect increasing flexibility and availability of reports that they can generate themselves. Users must also find ways to cope with increasing amounts of data in their ERP systems, and we expect reporting tools that can easily handle large and varied data sets (like SQL Server Reporting Services and Analysis Cubes for Excel) will continue to grow in relevance and importance in the Dynamics...
In the end, we can consider ourselves fortunate that we can choose from such a wide variety of reporting tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP. Each reporting tool meets a unique set of needs, and, if we are willing to be open and honest about the challenges we face with our organization's reporting requirements, we can select the most appropriate tool for the challenge at hand. While some tools may appear to work in the short term, we must consider the long term during this process, as well. As users begin to develop reports and grow more comfortable with using a particular reporting tool, it becomes more and more difficult to instigate a change in tools. If we do opt for the quick-fix, the quick-term solution, we may find ourselves devoting even more time and energy in the near future implementing a new set of reporting tools that are more appropriate than our first choice.
Additionally, as we have seen in this chapter, the challenges we face with report development are interrelated....
