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Birst: a whole in one reporting platform.
March 09, 2018

Birst: a whole in one reporting platform.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Birst

We are using birst in the international part of our logistics company. It is used across different departments. In the beginning it was used for sales and marketing but going forward we also provide information to finance and operations. Information is spread by using dashboards, scheduled reports and ad hoc reports. The information we provide via Birst is about client performance, quality of our service, year over year financial analysis and more.
Our current challenge is to implement a near real time reporting on our service in order to be proactive and to keep the degree of service at a high level.
  • It's rather easy to create a datamodel once you understand some basic rules.
  • Development can go pretty fast. Defining the input are more or less straightforward SQL queries, actually called BQL. Transforming input to output can be simple and straightforward but also complex problems can be solved.
  • The ad hoc report creation in visualizer is very convenient and easy to use. If needed a powerful formula can be created in order to transform existing attributes or measures. The editor to create those formulas has evolved from a basic one to an editor using type-ahead and lookups.
  • Dashboard creation is a piece of cake and the use of the dashboard with filtering,drill through and slice and dice is pretty straightforward and intuitive.
  • Birst is spending a lot of effort in the frontend and creating a product which will allow more and more self service for the end user. Nothing wrong with that wouldn't it be that in the backend, the admin part, some effort could be used to improve efficiency and usability.
  • Using a cloud application is both a good and a bad thing. When problems occur we sometimes wish to get more insight in the blackbox under the hood of Birst, actually the database with the physical tables. Fortunately the cloud solution offers us still more advantages than drawbacks.
  • Some powerusers like to get a whole lot of data so they can do some number crunching in their favorite spreadsheet. But Birst doesn't always fit this need as getting big chunks of data out of the system can be pretty inconvenient.
  • SAP Business Objects
The standard in our company is SAP Business objects. For the international part of the company we are using Birst because of its accesibility, ease of maintenance and ease of use. Compared to SAP BO dashboarding and easy to medium complex reports are easier to create and handle.
The administrator of a Birst platform doesn't has to be as technical as for other platforms. Of course, the more BI knowledge the better.
From a technical perspective it is so handy that everything can be handled through the browser. No installation is required.
As we are an international company where a lot of users are spread all over the globe and travelling a lot this is a good point.
The learning curve isn't steep for the users, a little steep for the administrator. Of course, complex solutions or improvement of performance require more insight and knowledge. Integration of different data coming from different sources, on premise or in the cloud, is another good feature of birst.
As stated previously the export of data isn't as powerful as expected. A workaround is of course to change the mindset of the users and get more familiar with using the Birst frontend instead of using a spreadsheet to do the actual analysis. In our current setup some performance improvements are required, and ongoing, to do online and fast analysis.

Infor Birst Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.5
Pixel Perfect reports
6
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
7.3
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
5
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
7.5
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
7
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
10.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
8.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
7
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using Birst

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
Inconsistent
  • Report creation in visualizer and the use of the reports in a dashboard is very straightforward. Simple or complex filtering can be applied.
  • Creation of a drill through from a KPI on a dashboard to a detailed report on another section of the dashboard is an easy thing to do.
  • Integration of different sources of different types on different locations is possible and can be simple as using the correct driver.
  • The administration part of the product isn't difficult to use but sometimes a bit old-fashioned and not always user friendly.
  • The editor in the admin module could be more efficient by using a more graphical interface, easy type-ahead functions and color coding.
  • Scheduling of reports is pretty easy. The disadvantage is that reports that need to be scheduled need to be created in designer and no visualizer reports can be used for that. We use visualizer reports as part of the dashboard and having the same type of reports for scheduling would be an improvement.
  • Exporting a dashboard to a PDF doesn't always give the expected result.
Yes - I evaluated and tested the android mobile interface on both tablet and smartphone. On a tablet it's of course easier to use as more display space is available. Birst on smartphone requires a better design of the dashboard for instance. Reusing the dashboard as created for using on a normal screen doesn't give the expected results. Our priority is to use Birst on laptops but we keep in mind that mobile use is an option which might be very useful when our project for near real time reporting on operations is in place.