Thursday, 9 May 2013
DSCallards Blog: Challenging Misconceptions About Business Intellig...
DSCallards Blog: Challenging Misconceptions About Business Intellig...: Business intelligence (BI) has been recognised by many businesses as a valuable tool to reach strategic goals, increase profitability, impro...
DSCallards Blog: What is Business Analytics Really And Why Should I...
DSCallards Blog: What is Business Analytics Really And Why Should I...: If you’ve been looking at the Business Intelligence (BI) market at any point in the last 12-18 months, the chances are that you’ve h...
DSCallards Blog: Building a Winning Case for Business Intelligence ...
DSCallards Blog: Building a Winning Case for Business Intelligence ...: We’ve all read the marketing blurb, and industry analysts tell us over and over again that “Business Intelligence helps you make b...
Monday, 29 April 2013
Maximising Every Opportunity with BI
In order to survive today's global economy, and keep up with the risks of every day business, companies of all sizes must make smarter decisions.
However, effective decision making requires accurate data. Key business analytics can help maximise existing revenues plus taqrget areas of expansion, by revealing exactly what's driving a business and new opportunities. More visibility and greater insight equals better decisions.
SAP Business Intelligence Solutions provides a dashboard with a single, reliable and real-time overview right across your company with the ability to track your competitors and spot market opportunities. It delivers quick insight and reduces your dependency on IT. You can even measure the business impact of a particular change by running what-if tests and unlock insights buried online in blogs and social networking content. And conveniently, all this is available on mobile devices as well as desktop computers, at an affordable price.
With information you can totally turst, you have a clear competitive advantage.
Click here to see how you can get on-the-go business intelligence. More.
Want information that you can totally trust? Contact us on 0800 652 4050 or email us at sales@dscallards.com to see how SAP Business Intelligence Solutions can help you to achieve this.
However, effective decision making requires accurate data. Key business analytics can help maximise existing revenues plus taqrget areas of expansion, by revealing exactly what's driving a business and new opportunities. More visibility and greater insight equals better decisions.
SAP Business Intelligence Solutions provides a dashboard with a single, reliable and real-time overview right across your company with the ability to track your competitors and spot market opportunities. It delivers quick insight and reduces your dependency on IT. You can even measure the business impact of a particular change by running what-if tests and unlock insights buried online in blogs and social networking content. And conveniently, all this is available on mobile devices as well as desktop computers, at an affordable price.
With information you can totally turst, you have a clear competitive advantage.
Click here to see how you can get on-the-go business intelligence. More.
Want information that you can totally trust? Contact us on 0800 652 4050 or email us at sales@dscallards.com to see how SAP Business Intelligence Solutions can help you to achieve this.
Planning for Tomorrow with Business Intelligence
If your company has seen its growth rocket through the tough economic times, that's great news. However, rapid growth can bring its own challenges if you don't have the right infrastructure in place.
With a flurry of activities, you probably don't even have time for a coffee, let alone think about whether your software meets your business needs. But as your company expands, accurate, up-to-date information is the key to achieving your business potential. You'll need an IT solution to monitor and manage every part of your company and it'll need to support your growth.
SAP Business Intelligence Solutions provides fact-based, quality information to help you identify and implement business controls. What's more, it'll meet your employees' needs for mobility. All this insight is available on mobile devices as well as desktop computers, so you can always be in touch - even when you're out of the office. Better still, SAP offers the ability to adapt as your business grows - whether you're handling 100 transactions, or 1 million transactions. All at an affordable price.
Want to know more about SAP Business Intelligence Solutions? Contact us on 0800 652 4050 or email us at sales@dscallards.com.
In a best run business, decisions are based on fact. Click here for more.
With a flurry of activities, you probably don't even have time for a coffee, let alone think about whether your software meets your business needs. But as your company expands, accurate, up-to-date information is the key to achieving your business potential. You'll need an IT solution to monitor and manage every part of your company and it'll need to support your growth.
SAP Business Intelligence Solutions provides fact-based, quality information to help you identify and implement business controls. What's more, it'll meet your employees' needs for mobility. All this insight is available on mobile devices as well as desktop computers, so you can always be in touch - even when you're out of the office. Better still, SAP offers the ability to adapt as your business grows - whether you're handling 100 transactions, or 1 million transactions. All at an affordable price.
Want to know more about SAP Business Intelligence Solutions? Contact us on 0800 652 4050 or email us at sales@dscallards.com.
In a best run business, decisions are based on fact. Click here for more.
Thursday, 25 April 2013
Crystal Reports Saved My Life
The story of an eighteen year voyage with the number one
report design tool
Today I’m travelling to Nottingham by train from the West
Country. Outside there is low cloud and the rolling hills are rushing by as we
approach Bristol.
Tomorrow I will be delivering a Crystal Reports course. I
have been conducting these courses since 2001 and I’ve made countless journeys
around the UK and occasionally into foreign lands to teach, promote and
encourage the use of this exceptional reporting tool.
Crystal Reports is twenty two years old this year, and in my
opinion it is still the number one report design tool in the BI space.
Back in 1995 I was working as a software trainer for a small
application development company in Reading. A few days after I started I was handed seven
floppy disks and was instructed by my then manager to install Seagate Crystal
Reports version 4 as we were bundling it with our own application called
OrderActive. At that time Seagate had two divisions, the NSMG (Network and
Storage Management Group) and the IMG (Information Management Group). OrderActive
was a Windows order entry package specifically targeted for the Mail Order
industry.
Having had no experience of report design, I attempted to work out what Crystal Reports actually did, without much success to start with. But eventually I started to understand how it worked and was able to contribute by writing some of the reports that were packaged with OrderActive. These were typically customer facing documents and each time we sold a copy of OrderActive I customised the look and feel of the packaged Crystal Reports as part of our service offering.
Very soon I started to enjoy working with Crystal Reports much more than working with OrderActive. And on replying to a job advert in my local paper for a ‘Report Writing Software Traineer’ in late 1997 and accepting the job in early 1998, I started to work with one of the first Seagate IMG partners in the UK.
At first I didn’t do any training. Instead, with a colleague, I set up a report writer’s user group. This was initially aimed at anyone who used report writing applications. This is where I was able to compare Seagate Crystal Reports with R&R Report Writer, (owned by Wallsoft at the time) and one or two other competitive report writing tools in the marketplace.
As we venture beyond Bristol the landscape is scattered with church spires, livestock and undulating green countryside. Bird’s nests are prominent in the bare trees.
Very soon, it became clear that Crystal Reports was the leading report writing tool in terms of popularity and functionality. We renamed our user group to ‘The Crystal Reports and Info Exchange’.
I got the opportunity to really learn Crystal Reports by manning a support desk for three years. Now instead of customising the same set of reports, I was given all manner of challenges solving other Crystal Users’ technical questions.
In June 1999 Seagate released Crystal Reports 7 and then in the year 2000 Seagate Crystal Reports 8. It was to be Seagate’s last release, as by 2001 Crystal Decisions had acquired Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports 8.5 was introduced.
At last, in 2001, I was given my chance at training Crystal Reports. Now, twelve years on, I have been lucky enough to visit a multitude of cities, towns, (I haven’t been to Middlesborough, Hull or Blackburn yet!) and even rural communities to share my knowledge and help people to understand the world’s best report writer.
At last there are some lambs in the fields; everything is late this year, there still aren’t any leaves on the trees as the train speeds through Worcestershire with alacrity. Allotments replace countryside scenes and tower blocks replace allotments as the surroundings change. There are Canada geese and ducks on the canals as we approach Birmingham.
I have worked for DSCallards for four and a half years now. My role with Crystal Reports hasn’t changed much. People often ask me ‘don’t you get bored training the same courses over and over again’. My answer is always the same.
I never get bored because every course and every course delegate is different. People learn at diverse speeds. This makes each course feel different. I have been fortunate enough to meet hundreds, (maybe thousands, I’ve never counted), of individuals across many types of businesses and industries. I have often been required to learn their three letter acronyms and gain an insight into how their particular industry works.
I’ve been able to write Crystal Reports for many companies and see these reports being used in their day to day activities.
But the best reward has been the chance to help people get started, or enhance their existing knowledge in what I’m sure will continue to be the most widely used and established report design tool in the world.
Back to the present and back to reality. I’ve got to change at Derby in a minute!!!
Having had no experience of report design, I attempted to work out what Crystal Reports actually did, without much success to start with. But eventually I started to understand how it worked and was able to contribute by writing some of the reports that were packaged with OrderActive. These were typically customer facing documents and each time we sold a copy of OrderActive I customised the look and feel of the packaged Crystal Reports as part of our service offering.
Very soon I started to enjoy working with Crystal Reports much more than working with OrderActive. And on replying to a job advert in my local paper for a ‘Report Writing Software Traineer’ in late 1997 and accepting the job in early 1998, I started to work with one of the first Seagate IMG partners in the UK.
At first I didn’t do any training. Instead, with a colleague, I set up a report writer’s user group. This was initially aimed at anyone who used report writing applications. This is where I was able to compare Seagate Crystal Reports with R&R Report Writer, (owned by Wallsoft at the time) and one or two other competitive report writing tools in the marketplace.
As we venture beyond Bristol the landscape is scattered with church spires, livestock and undulating green countryside. Bird’s nests are prominent in the bare trees.
Very soon, it became clear that Crystal Reports was the leading report writing tool in terms of popularity and functionality. We renamed our user group to ‘The Crystal Reports and Info Exchange’.
I got the opportunity to really learn Crystal Reports by manning a support desk for three years. Now instead of customising the same set of reports, I was given all manner of challenges solving other Crystal Users’ technical questions.
In June 1999 Seagate released Crystal Reports 7 and then in the year 2000 Seagate Crystal Reports 8. It was to be Seagate’s last release, as by 2001 Crystal Decisions had acquired Crystal Reports and Crystal Reports 8.5 was introduced.
At last, in 2001, I was given my chance at training Crystal Reports. Now, twelve years on, I have been lucky enough to visit a multitude of cities, towns, (I haven’t been to Middlesborough, Hull or Blackburn yet!) and even rural communities to share my knowledge and help people to understand the world’s best report writer.
At last there are some lambs in the fields; everything is late this year, there still aren’t any leaves on the trees as the train speeds through Worcestershire with alacrity. Allotments replace countryside scenes and tower blocks replace allotments as the surroundings change. There are Canada geese and ducks on the canals as we approach Birmingham.
I have worked for DSCallards for four and a half years now. My role with Crystal Reports hasn’t changed much. People often ask me ‘don’t you get bored training the same courses over and over again’. My answer is always the same.
I never get bored because every course and every course delegate is different. People learn at diverse speeds. This makes each course feel different. I have been fortunate enough to meet hundreds, (maybe thousands, I’ve never counted), of individuals across many types of businesses and industries. I have often been required to learn their three letter acronyms and gain an insight into how their particular industry works.
I’ve been able to write Crystal Reports for many companies and see these reports being used in their day to day activities.
But the best reward has been the chance to help people get started, or enhance their existing knowledge in what I’m sure will continue to be the most widely used and established report design tool in the world.
Back to the present and back to reality. I’ve got to change at Derby in a minute!!!
Written by: Steve Chapman, Senior Business Intelligence Consultant, DSCallards
For more information visit: www.crystalreports.co.uk
Thursday, 18 April 2013
Roll Up Roll Up ... Why Crystal Reports for Enterprise Loves the Universe
With previous versions of the Crystal Reports integration with the Business Object universe your universe query was converted into an SQL command, a purely SQL object. This approach was an arranged marriage, required to enable the houses of Business Objects and Crystal to join together and rule business intelligence as one.
Over time and under the tutelage of supreme ruler SAP, the two technologies have developed a special kind of love which has been rewarded with shiny new editions conceived and built to work together.
With the SAP BusinessObjects BI4 Information Design Tool (easy for you to say…), universes now sit firmly in the current century with multi-source, modular components and modern user interface. Crystal Reports for Enterprise also appears with the BI4 release. It has very similar functionality to Crystal Reports 2011 in most areas, but delivered within a more modern user interface, designed to be more intuitive.
A definite functional difference with CR4E vs CR2011 comes when you query a universe and the way Crystal rolls up the data.
Where Crystal traditionally returns every row of data, one of the clever things that Web Intelligence has always done is roll up / collapse the data to a short list of distinct entries. So for example, in the xtreme database (the Crystal sample db) orders table there are 2192 transactions/rows, each with one of six couriers in the ‘ship via’ column. Querying this column in Crystal 2011 either directly against the database or via a universe will return 2192 rows in the report. Querying it with CR4E via a BI4 universe will return six rows. CR4E now effectively applies a group by clause to the display data based on the universe dimension objects displayed in the report, just like Web Intelligence always has. It’s what Business Objects calls semantically dynamic.
Whilst report designers experienced with SQL may want the flexibility of controlling roll up themselves via Crystal grouping (which still exists in CR4E), the CR2011 behaviour of repeating distinct values in this way can be confusing for non-technical users. If someone selects ‘Courier’ they would naturally expect to see a list of all couriers; seeing them repeated over multiple rows is confusing.
There are also many cosmetic differences targeting CR4E at less technical users, for example:
Written by: Angus Menter, Business Intelligence Project Manager, DSCallards.
For more information, visit www.crystalreports.co.uk
Over time and under the tutelage of supreme ruler SAP, the two technologies have developed a special kind of love which has been rewarded with shiny new editions conceived and built to work together.
With the SAP BusinessObjects BI4 Information Design Tool (easy for you to say…), universes now sit firmly in the current century with multi-source, modular components and modern user interface. Crystal Reports for Enterprise also appears with the BI4 release. It has very similar functionality to Crystal Reports 2011 in most areas, but delivered within a more modern user interface, designed to be more intuitive.
A definite functional difference with CR4E vs CR2011 comes when you query a universe and the way Crystal rolls up the data.
Where Crystal traditionally returns every row of data, one of the clever things that Web Intelligence has always done is roll up / collapse the data to a short list of distinct entries. So for example, in the xtreme database (the Crystal sample db) orders table there are 2192 transactions/rows, each with one of six couriers in the ‘ship via’ column. Querying this column in Crystal 2011 either directly against the database or via a universe will return 2192 rows in the report. Querying it with CR4E via a BI4 universe will return six rows. CR4E now effectively applies a group by clause to the display data based on the universe dimension objects displayed in the report, just like Web Intelligence always has. It’s what Business Objects calls semantically dynamic.
Whilst report designers experienced with SQL may want the flexibility of controlling roll up themselves via Crystal grouping (which still exists in CR4E), the CR2011 behaviour of repeating distinct values in this way can be confusing for non-technical users. If someone selects ‘Courier’ they would naturally expect to see a list of all couriers; seeing them repeated over multiple rows is confusing.
There are also many cosmetic differences targeting CR4E at less technical users, for example:
- Crystal beginners used to get confused between 'suppress' and 'hide' - what was 'suppress' is now 'hide'; what was 'hide' is now 'show on drill down only'. (Sounds confusing but makes sense when you use the tool).
- Sections also confuse beginners, 'details' is now called 'body'.
- In CR2011, sums are inserted by default in the group footer, whilst the group name is in the group header, making the two hard to correlate. With CR4E you are promoted with a plain English 'sum above or below data?' option.
Written by: Angus Menter, Business Intelligence Project Manager, DSCallards.
For more information, visit www.crystalreports.co.uk
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