SAP Crystal Reports - Still great but slowing down
October 31, 2019
SAP Crystal Reports - Still great but slowing down
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
SAP Crystal Reports
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal
SAP Crystal Reports is used throughout our company. It allows us to present consistent and branded reports to all of our internal and external clients. It also allows us to have standardized cost reporting. Prior to implementing SAP Crystal Reports, we had different sites presenting clients with their own custom cost reports. Many of these were done in Excel and there was no consistency across our organization. SAP Crystal Reports has replaced those and now we provide one consistent and branded report.
- Crystal Reports allows us to create a consistent template for all of our reports.
- Crystal Reports and Server allows us to house a repository for all of our reports to make them easy to find and update when necessary.
- Crystal Reports can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
- Crystal Reports can be a little daunting when first implementing. There are a lot of nuances in learning how to truly master this software and it can be frustrating at times.
- There are a lot of features in Crystal Reports that do not always work as expected. You may find yourself searching the Web for how to get the results that you want.
- Crystal Reports does not provide updates on a regular basis. New concepts and ideas may be a while in implementing.
- The initial setup can be frustrating. There are times when you need to go outside of the install package to make it work with particular data sources, etc. It is not always a 100% install.
- We were able to provide enterprise wide reporting from our ERP system which saved our site analysts time saved between downloading data and presenting it in Excel. We saved roughly 250 man hours per month with a single soltution.
- Some sites would spend 2 hours daily just importing data into an Access database and reporting out. Crystal eliminated all of that time.
For standard pixel perfect reporting, our company still uses Crystal Reports. It allows us to continually provide standard reporting to our clients. For dashboards, we are moving towards Microsoft Power BI. Power BI allows similar collaboration, but generally has better features for dashboards. Power BI also allows us to publish multiple reports and dashboards into a single app for our end users.