Business & Technology Synergy

When we are talking about reporting for your ERP/MRP application, we should mention, that you can not expect equal performance from all consultants.  The matter of fact is – each consultant specializes in her/his own set of tools and has historical level of experience and so, expertise.  Reporting is one of the most typical areas where delivery may stall and you as a customer may be completely frustrated.  In the case of Microsoft Great Plains Dynamics GP let us give you some reporting highlights:

• “The most powerful tool” – sometimes you hear from report developer, that the newest version of Crystal Reports of SRS will give you what is lacking to make the report work with current version.  This statement is often true, but you should be conservative and ask you – is it really the fact that the technology didn’t work previous decades and all the sudden it will be doing the job only since now and on?
• What Reporting Tool are Intended for?  From experienced reporting designer, all the reporting tools are for listing and grouping the records from THE QUERY.  The query is something that you create in SQL.  If you expect that you will get reporting DB linking wizard to create perfect query for you – this might be overoptimistic
• SQL Views and Stored Procedures.  These two instruments are outside of the scope of the traditional reporting tools, and at the same time they make your report work to the specs.  In our opinion reporting for Microsoft Dynamics GP should be considering from the position of creating relevant SQL View or SQL Stored Procedure

And also please review Crystal Reports highlights for GP:

If you are developer who is asked: how do we extend Great Plains ReportWriter with somewhat more sophisticated – read this and you will have the clues on where to look further.
 

• Great Plains Tables Structure – first of all you need to know the tables to link. Launch Great Plains and go to Tools->Resource Description->Tables. Find the table in the proper series. If you are looking for the customers – it should be RM00101 – customer master file. If you need historical Sales Order Processing documents – they are in SOP30200 – Sales History Header file, etc.
• Create ODBC connection to GP Company database. Use the same technique as when you create standard ODBC connection for GP workstation – but change default database to targeted company database.
• Consider SQL Views – if you don’t want complex links in Crystal Report itself or if you need unionization from several companies – SQL view is the answer.
• Consider SQL Stored Procedures. Sometimes you can not pull the data in one view – you need temporary tables to be created and the final query should be based on these temp tables – this is when you need stored procedure.
• Call Crystal Report from GP Screens via VBA/Modifier – if the user wants to call Crystal report for example - printing Invoices in GP and do it from SOP Entry window – you can use Modifier and VBA to call Crystal Reports engine.
• Create SQL Query to probe the data – we always recommend tuning your query and see that you are getting adequate results – in any case – Crystal Report is just a nice tool to show the results of your query.

Happy customizing, querying and designing! if you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com 
 

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