SAP Crystal: Flexibility, Customization, and Ease of Use
January 08, 2018
SAP Crystal: Flexibility, Customization, and Ease of Use
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
SAP Crystal Server
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal
SAP Crystal was being used mainly by one department within my organization, that being the Online Brand Protection Department. It's a fantastic tool for report generation and data aggregation in that it is fully customizable and allows for various users and vendors to access the system to both feed and retrieve information. We needed something that would give us flexibility and also allow multiple users to access the data at the same time.
- Customized reports are great because they not only allow you to tailor the data and results to you needs but also allow the flexibility of changing reporting structures if needs change.
- Multiple user access and permissions are essential to control who has visibility to what data as well as providing a common hub for everyone to collaborate and communicate about the data.
- Relatively inexpensive compared to other products out there. This really goes hand in hand with their customer support because you feel like you're getting a much more expensive product for the quality of the program as a whole.
- Although the reporting structure is highly customizable, it is essential to have a developer who is well versed in coding the reports for you in SAP Crystal Server. This isn't so much a problem with SAP Crystal because in order to get customizable reports, you really need to know how to work the system which is very flexible.
- Data security needs to be tweaked within each report for different audiences and so if you need different vendors or deliverables to have different security settings, then you need to set this up within each report that you generate.
- From what I hear about how the licensing model is set up, there is a bit of layering confusion. Apparently, once your business licenses the software, you must then create different licenses for various users and vendors. I could see this getting confusing especially with different add-ons and multiple users.
Tableau was a great and user-friendly tool to use for a long time; however, it did not manage various users and their security access very well nor did it provide the level of reporting variation that was necessary at my company. SAP Crystal took some legwork, in the beginning, to get set up and at a place where we felt comfortable, but once there we were able to adapt to new reports and new data feeds much faster than with Tableau.