My Guide to SAP Crystal Reports for Beginners

Mervin came to DSCallards with a problem, he found himself on a Monday morning trawling through hundreds of databases to write reports, although he did write the same report last week!! But because the data has changed he had to go back and do it all again, and again, and again (Groundhog Day!!).

So we came along and took away that pain for him with SAP Crystal Reports and instead of re-writing his reports each day and each week all he needed to do was create the reports once with the SAP Crystal Reports writer, then each time he ran that report it would update with the latest data. Simples! (We also helped Mervin with Crystal training) Now Mondays are fun, he can send the report via email in PDF format; he can print it or share the report with a flash file.

Due to the reports being so useful in the business the team was asking Mervin to create more and more reports every day or they needed updated versions of the reports already created so Mervin came to us to see if we could help again and we helped Mervin with a SAP Crystal Platform.

This opened the door for the business to securely open, view, interact with and share reports and dashboards over the Web. It enabled the business to intuitively explore and visualize data! Mervin could also setup security to control access to specific folders and reports. He could also specify the rights for users or groups, to schedule or export reports. 

Mervin could not believe how this revolutionized the whole reporting system. His team was able to pull their own reports at any time of the day and even change the built in parameters to tailor the reports for their department! Mervin even set up a burst if certain criteria wasn’t being met a report was sent out to highlight that in real time. 

The reports were now easy to read, with one true single form of data, Information came to life!!! 

The reports were now critical to the running of the business and as more and more colleagues wanted to analyze their own data Mervin was inundated for requests to write bespoke reports.  So he came to us and asked if there was anything that Crystal could do to help him with this and of course we came to the rescue and created a Universe.

We got to work on this right away; we created a virtual platform called a universe where you could ask the universe for a certain bit of information and the universe will talk to the databases and pull that information into a report that can be saved to the Crystal Platform. What was amazing is that this was so easy for everyone to do they didn’t need any technical background and they didn’t need to ask Mervin to do it for them.

Mervin was very happy, got a raise and lived happily ever after!

There are two types of businesses. The first have a BI system in place the other doesn’t. Who would your customers rather work with?

Written by Donna Hornickel, Sales Executive, DSCallards (and Mervin’s wife)

For more information, visit www.crystalreports.co.uk.