Does anyone have any comments regarding Crystal Decisions.

My company is considering purchasing crystal reports 8.5.

Is this report writer easy to use?

Thank you.

Yes, the reports are easy to use. Since Crystal uses the Baan data dictionary, it is easy to create reports using the known data elements.

We have been using it for over 2 years and have many satisfied users with over 800 reports to show for it. You can use it against any standard database, but the Baan interface can only be licensed to you if you have Crystal Enterprise and not the stand alone version of Crystal Reports (even though it will work with it). As I understand it, the minimum license for the Baan interface is 25 users at $50 (USD) per license plus optional support fees. Crystal Enterprise is Crystal Reports with a distribution system built around it. Most of our non-IS users found it easy to learn and made use of it immediately.

We are running Crystal since Version 5.0 (now: 8.5) with great success. Our whole sales statistic is made with Crystal. Users appreciate the multiple export functions to different formats like PDF or Excel.
After several years of experience we added Crystal Enterprise for automatic scheduling and distribution of the reports.

Regards,

Martin

We are using Crystal Report 8.5 since 2002 January. It’s a good product and very easy to use, not only IT People but also non IT peoples.

regards

Srilal

I am surprised. We are just evaluating Crystal Reports (actually my customer already bought it.) There are some major drawbacks that we are facing right now. Probably someone has some suggestions.

(By the way, Forum Master... Doesn't this thread belong to "third party applications"? Move?)

Ok, Drawbacks:

Native Baan Driver:
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I call it the "Two item master data problem": If you are using customized items and standard items, you have two different tables in Baan IV containing item data. It is very hard to link from say the sales order position table to the correct item master table.

Same problem when using more than one currency (all you American guys and girls won't have that problem, you have just to deal with dollars... :-)) If you use transaction currency and home currency differently, you will have to do currency calculations within Crystal, and not always the rate that's in the table is the rate you have to use. When using the Euro functionality, it's getting even harder, because sometimes rates are inverted rates, sometimes they aren't.

Complex Reports are very hard to do. Anyone tried to build the report "Project costs and revenues" in Crystal by accessing tdsls045 and tipcs360 and do some profit calculations? If you did, how? I stopped working on this after one day and got back to good old Baan.

You can't do multi language reports, you can't do versioning - all things that are all easy in Baan...


Integrated Baan Reporting:
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Practically useless. Transports layout information (not DATA!) to the Crystal Reporting System. In oter words, the Spool file is sent to crystal in XML format, not the report layout and report data (Which would be something like all declared external variables)

You may modify the layout in Crystal, however, if you recompile the Baan report, all modifications are lost. You have to recompile the report, when a user want's an additional field on the report (because, see above, it has to be on the layout, not in the data)

Integrated Baan reporting is nice to print a logo on top of the page, good for distributing Baan reports via the Web, and good for exporting Baan Report Data to Excel. Bad for doing anything in the layouts that's not in the original Baan report.


After all, Crystal Reports for Baan is a nice first shot and probably the future, but it needs still some time to be as productive as the native Baan reporting environment.

Quite negative today,
Uli

Whilst ulrich.fuchs has pointed out some of the negatives. I think I need to say that most of these can be overcome by setting up a data warehouse and doing all necessary conversions as part of the data transfer. (keep the technical stuff with the IT dept)
Therefore keeping life simple for the end users.

It also goes without saying that using a datawarehouse also gives you an opprotunity to simplify the database structure for the end users by flattening out the data structure. The technical term is converting from a snowflake schema to a star schema.

We are currently using Baan 5b and we did as described above. Of course this means that we are not using the Crystal Decisions Baan package but Just Seagate Info. This did however have some dramatic performance improvements for us

1) Report development time shrank dramatically as there where less table joins to worry about.
2) Because the data structure has been flattened the reports ran alot faster.
3) It removed some load from the Baan server/database as the data warehouse is a seperate database.

Of course the negative to all this is the data can be up to 24 hours old. Depending on the frequency of update for the datawarehouse.

Let me know if you would like me to explain more how we did this. As it was all done in house using store procedures.

Nick,

to put some sort of Data Warehouse in between is also what I am thinking about here right now. However I am always reluctant to do things directly in the database when using Baan.

I am thinking about some batch jobs building "data-warehouse-tables" defined within Baan Tools. Then end users will be able to link with the Crystal Native Driver to those tables.

However, in that case the data they are working on is about one day old.

If I had a wish free, I would want the development guys of Baan/Seagate to:

- seperate the data and layout information for Integrated Baan Reporting.
- (Re)build the basic Baan logic (how Baan links the tables procedurally) for item data access, deliveries, receipts, accounts receivable and acc. payable and for currency transformations into the Native Driver.

Then this would be really a good tool.

Perhaps Ulrich should try using the Safari report writer for Baan for a while before passing judgement on Crystal's product. I have personally used Safari and very much prefer the Crystal's product. Granted, Crystal like other products is not perfect, but they do listen to their customers and do make improvements based on customer input. As for the functionallity that you wish they had... I have asked Crystal to ask Baan about getting a relational map of their system, but unfortunately Baan doesn't even have one to give out. Right now we have over 800 Baan/Crystal reports that our users and IS group have created. Our users love it and continue to ask for more.

Sorry Ulrich, but I don't wish to sound negative toward your comments. No product is perfect, but this one has a lot more positives for than negatives.

>I have asked Crystal to ask Baan about getting a relational map of their system, but unfortunately Baan doesn't even have one to give out.

That is exactly the problem: Crystal is a great reporting tool if you have a relational database to act on. However, Baan uses it's database not in a strictly relational style. Therefore there is no relational map, and therefore the problems do arise.

If a particular Baan installation comes pretty close to a relational system (no customer specific items, e.g), then Crystal will do better than at a site where Baan is used in it's full extend.

It that case, the Baan Report writer is far more efficient. If you still want to use Crystal, you definitely need some sort of data warehouse the endusers can work with. Unfortunately Crystal has no good tools (yet) to build that data warehouse.

That's not negative, that are the facts. But I don't say other products are better.

Yours,
Uli

Perhaps the answer lies with the Baan BIS product. If you do not want to build your own datawarehouse. Part of the BIS package is a datawarehouse tool. It will create a datawarehouse and do regualr updates for you.:p

Hmmmmm.

Sounds to me that a lot of you have been able to get the Native Drivers from Crystal without having to by the entire Baan package. They are telling me that I must buy Crystal Enterprise for Baan in order to get the drivers.....and that package is overkill for us right now and way too pricey. I have an old version of the drivers, from 1999 I think (when they used to be free!), but I can't get them to work with CR 8.5.

I've worked with CR in the past with other systems and was happy with it.
So have people been offered other options from Crystal, other than buying the whole enterprise package?

Hmmmmm.

Sounds to me that a lot of you have been able to get the Native Drivers from Crystal without having to by the entire Baan package. They are telling me that I must buy Crystal Enterprise for Baan in order to get the drivers.....and that package is overkill for us right now and way too pricey. I have an old version of the drivers, from 1999 I think (when they used to be free!), but I can't get them to work with CR 8.5.

I've worked with CR in the past with other systems and was happy with it.
So have people been offered other options from Crystal, other than buying the whole enterprise package?

The Baan driver can only be licensed with the purchase of Crystal Enterprise (formerly Seagate Info). It does work with Crystal Reports by itself, but they won't license it that way. That's still better than Safari which makes you buy as many licenses as you have on your Baan system. In our case that was 200, and that's too many.

The quotes I'm getting from Crystal are quite a bit more than $50 dollars per seat.
More like around $32K for 45 users (around the same for 10 concurrent licenses) and an additional $6-8K for 1 year maint.
The cost for the Baan solution alone (not including Enterprise itself) is $119 per seat.

From the sounds of it, Seagate is jumping on the ERP overpricing bandwagon.

This is why many companies have decided to write their reports with Baan Tools.

- Bader

It might be interesting to see just what companies use for writing thier reports. I think there was a poll once for third party products but was there one just for reporting?