Getting the Answers When You Need Them: Customized Reporting with SAP Crystal Reports

Mass customization is not a new concept; in fact it traces its roots back to the early 90’s, when author and expert on the subject, B. Joseph Pine II, published his book Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition. While there have been a few large businesses employing this management paradigm for years, it has only been within the last decade that enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, such as SAP Business One, have made this business model more feasible for the small to midsized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt. However, for SMEs, catering to their customers’ growing expectation of infinite choice in an ecommerce-based marketplace presents new challenges. SMEs are now met with the need for instant access to information about their customers' ever-changing buying behaviors so that they can make accurate and timely decisions when assessing risks and new opportunities for growth.

By integrating SAP Crystal Reports software with SAP Business One, business managers now have access to advanced reporting, providing them with the answers necessary to make quick decisions and responses to opportunities for business growth. After installing SAP Crystal Reports, following the simple guided procedure, you can access it directly from within SAP Business One. SAP Crystal Reports then provides you with the necessary tools to access critical business information, through sales analysis, inventory availability and purchasing analysis reports in addition to the ability to complement the standard, ready-made reports with custom user-defined fields for an in-depth look at sales performance, overdue receivables, year-to-date revenue and service call turnover specific to your business.

SAP Crystal Reports bases these custom reports on live data drawn from all parts of your business including accounting, sales, purchasing, production, inventory, service, and operations and also allows you to access data from other applications of SAP software solution partners and other company software. Then, once your custom reports have been created with SAP Crystal Reports, you are then able to import them into SAP Business One, providing one single and consistent user experience where you can conveniently get answers about your business’ performance whenever you need them.

SAP Crystal reports also allows for a variety of presentation formats which include drill-down functionality and sophisticated formatting. These visual reports can then be further customized with user-defined fields and then exported in formats that best fit your specific business needs, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, RTF, and XML. SAP Crystal Reports are also interactive allowing you to explore information interactively without having to re-query your database, meaning that you can answer business questions faster and with fewer reports.

Together, SAP Business One and SAP Crystal Reports deliver the tools to create customized reports to enable your business with:

• Faster and better decision making thanks to timely and accurate reports based on critical company data across financials, sales, customers, inventory, service, production, and operations
• Cost savings resulting from reduced time and effort required to generate reports and reduced dependence on IT
• Improved access to critical information specific to your business and customers in the appropriate format whenever you need it.

Still not crystal clear? Pan through the SAP Crystal Reports product brief to see sample business reports, and learn how together, SAP Business One and SAP Crystal Reports delivers custom reporting functionality and instant access to accurate, up-to-date information, that enable small businesses to drive intelligent decision making amidst the ever-changing customer trends.