This is a general information question on labor utilization reporting.
I'm converting an existing custom Lawson back office report which shows labor utilization by company/cost center/job. This is an old paper report that was earlier published to eBroadCast.
Some user issues were that it could not be effectively exported into an Excel spreadsheet for them to work with more effectively. We have a few different versions of this back office report - one reports the numbers per pay period, another presents the same data by month, another by year-to-date.
I'm looking to convert this into a Crystal report to be exported into Excel by end users. On the technical side, I know how to write the sql to grab and summarize data and how to format the report to be easily exported to Excel. My questions are - has anyone converted old paper-based back office reports to Excel and what has been the acceptance by end users?
- what particular issues have you experienced as relates to end-user acceptance of such as change-over? (from paper-based report to spreadsheet oriented)?
- how have you summarized your data - by pay period, month, and year-to-date? or just one of these?
- are there any other points that worth knowing about which I have not asked about?
thanks in advance for any feedback you can give me
Hello,
I've converted back-end reports to Excel using the CSV conversion capability thru the prtmgr. From which, I've downloaded the file to a local share and imported into M/S-Access. From there I've developed better looking reports based upon criteria. By doing it this way, the users can run their own imports and reports without touching the actual Lawson database. Some have the knowledge to even write their own queries/reports once the data is in M/S-Access. We do not use Crystal at my shop. The only drawback I see (and this goes for any back end reporting tool), is that the data can be massaged (intentionally or unintentionally) before the final report/excel spreadsheet is produced.
For back-end reports where we don't want the end-users to have their 'hands' in the data, I've developed a report bursting tool which actually works better (I think ;-) than what LBI offers for this same purpose. My tool splits the reports based upon parameters entered and send the end users their own portion of the report (by dropping it into their own prtmgr) and fires off an email notification to them that the report is ready to be viewed.