SAP Crystal Reporting

SAP Crystal Reports

SAP Crystal Reports was an early reporting software created in the 1980s. It was subsequently acquired by BusinessObjects and eventually joined the SAP portfolio when SAP acquired BusinessObjects. SAP has continued to develop the product and has released the latest version SAP Crystal Reports 2020.

SAP Crystal Reports

SAP Crystal Reports helps business users analyze data by creating richly formatted, multi-page reports from virtually any data source, delivered in more than a dozen formats. Such formats can be used to generate customer or partner facing assets such as custom invoices, billing statements, letters, sales and operations reports, and promotion campaigns with drag-and-drop interfaces.

While SAP Crystal Reports is marketed to small and medium-sized businesses, it can be an easy reporting tool for enterprises too.

SAP Crystal Reports Benefits

SAP Crystal Reports makes it easy for business users to create reports easily while also ensuring security and access rights. Some of the advantages it provides are:

Ability to easily analyze and report on business data by creating intuitive reports and dashboards with drag-and-drop simplicity
Security settings for reporting environments by defining user rights to access, view, refresh, export, or print reports
Insights to understand business and share the facts to provide ready-to-consume information, as reports and dashboards, to colleagues, suppliers, partners, and customers.

SAP Crystal Reports files are saved with extension “.rpt”

Reporting and analytics are fields where many vendors are coming up with innovations such as pre-built reports, automation, and intuitive user interfaces. Apart from SAP BusinessObjects, Qlik, Pyramid Analytics, and apexanalyticsalso provide rich reporting and analytics capabilities.

While such tools are a boon to business users, there is increasing recognition that what comes out of data depends on data quality. Hence, many SAP companies are embarking on data management projects ranging from master data governance, intelligent data cleansing, enabling data virtualization to analyze data rather than making static copies, etc. This also becomes critical when the security, access control, and compliance requirements come into play.

SAP Crystal Reports is a useful tool in the reporting portfolio for low value reports. However, the demands for analytics in today’s complex data volumes may be better met with more sophisticated solutions.

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