How many custom reports do you have? Do you have 25, 50 – or is your number in the
range of 100 to 250 custom reports? Or
are you in the category where you don’t know how many custom reports you have
because your users are creating their own uncontrolled reports in tools like
Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel?
The topic of custom reports leads to a myriad of questions
including –
- Is each custom
report utilized?
- What determines if
a custom report is approved, and then developed?
- Should super users be given database and report
development access?
- What mechanisms are
in place to insure that correct data is being returned in the custom reports?
- How much do custom reports cost -- in terms of design,
development, test, administration, maintenance dollars and resources?
As John Heywood told us back in the 16th century
that ‘Rome was
not built in one day’. … my thoughts in
the 21st century are that we can’t answer all those questions in
today’s BiLog. However, we can start a
plan to give you ideas on how you can reduce your number of custom reports.
One of the first and directly actionable means to reduce
your custom reports is to begin using V7’s Ad Hoc Reporting feature, QBR. By using QBR within any V7 application, you and/or
your users can quickly create reports that can include complex where clauses,
filters, sorting, grouping, and parameters.
QBR functionality enables key features including -
· -
Enabling users to quickly create their own reports
for their unique business needs
·
- Does not require technical, development skills,
like Java, or database knowledge to create the report
·
- Does not consume development hours in creating and
maintaining large numbers of unique reports, which may only be used by a very
small number of users
The cornerstone of QBR functionality are Report Object
Structures, ROS. ROS enable users to
select fields from multiple categories (objects) for their ad hoc reports. ROS are designed to enable
users to quickly visualize their hierarchies and parent/child relationships. They are created in the Object Structure
application of V7, and in the next BiLog, we’ll discuss their key attributes
and how to extend them.
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