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Crystal Reports - your Real-Time SAP ERP Reporting Solution
Updated January 08, 2018

Crystal Reports - your Real-Time SAP ERP Reporting Solution

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

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal

Crystal Reports is used as a foundation for our external financial reporting, including balance sheets, income statements, and other special reports. We have used it to create inventory reports out of SAP ERP, operational reporting, and master data governance. For our EAM group, it has reduced backlogs, provided real-time visibility into our ERP system, and ensure good data governance
  • Good integration with SAP ERP
  • Provides great embedded analytics with SAP ERP
  • It's the "Swiss Army" knife of reporting
  • Much easier to use than coding an ABAP report
  • Crystal for Enterprise could provide better integration with SAP ERP
  • Provide more ease of use/learning and reporting
We use other SAP BI products and Crystal is the one that provides the pixel perfect formatted reporting and integrates the best with our SAP ERP system in a real-time fashion.
SAP Business Objects, SAP ERP, SAP Business Warehouse
If you are on enhancement pack 5 or higher, I highly recommend using Crystal Reports with SAP ERP, if your data volume is small. It is excellent for highly formatted reporting such as external financial statements and inventory forms.

SAP Crystal Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
9.0
Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
10
8.3
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
10.0
Publish to Web
Not Rated
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using SAP Crystal

400 - all business functions
1 - Business person who is tech-savvy
  • Tie it more SAP reporting transactions
  • Financial Reporting
  • Operational Reporting
  • Transactional Reporting
  • Inventory Reporting
  • Solved master data issues
  • Real time financial reporting

Evaluating SAP Crystal and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Prior Experience with the Product
It has pixel perfect and nice formatting features - e.g. Financial Statement perfect features. It does it all. Plus it works natively with SAP ERP tables - no other product does that today. Many in our company are already familiar with using Crystal Reports and are experienced users. It is used for operational and financial reporting out of SAP ERP/ECC.
No; no other product offers pixel perfect formatting for output. Plus it is an inexpensive product. Crystal Reports is one of the most active used communities on the SAP Community site. Fortunately we have not had to submit any SAP Support incidents. It works very well with SAP; only Crystal can use SAP ALV as a data source.

SAP Crystal Implementation

ECC customers should look at using SAP ALV as a data source; this is what we did to implement our financial statements. It is easy to use. Also make your default variants layout to Crystal - easy to use, and will be an easy interface for your end users. I highly recommend Crystal Reports for this.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - Easy to use, easy to install - we have not attended any SAP training for it. If there's an issue, you can easily search and find the issue yourself. How to do a formula? Google and search for it. Excellent support of SAP ALV as a data source - only product to do it.
  • None - easy to use!!

SAP Crystal Support

Good news - we have had not had to submit an incident for SAP Support; any issue we have had with Crystal Reports we can search the SAP Community site and the error is resolved. It is a top used SAP Community and I recommend everyone use it when they have an issue.
ProsCons
None
None
Yes - It is part of our license agreement.
Only when using the SAP community site - we can search and find our errors quickly - https://answers.sap.com/ - search for any issue, and chances are someone has already found it. SAP has have SAP Support team members monitor the site for issues and help. "Search before you post or report" an incident...time saver.

Using SAP Crystal

It is not a self-service tool but is excellent for highly formatted reporting
ProsCons
Like to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
Difficult to use
  • Easy to embed in SAP ERP
  • Highly formatted reports
  • It's free inside SAP ERP
  • Initially data connectivity to SAP ERP but once resolved, it works
Yes - It works as long as you have the SAP BI platform