ReportsNow DAS VS. Enterprise Solution Pros/Cons

antexity

Member
We are currently running Cognos. A project is underway to find a reporting solution that will meet the requirements that the executives are looking for (Kpis, Dashboards, Scorecards), or upgrade Cognos and models.

While doing research, a tool from ReportsNow crossed my path. All I really know is that it sits on top of JDE and leverages the views and security. Instant value. While this sounds too good to be true, I am reaching out on here to see if anyone had experiences with selecting an enterprise tool vs ReportsNow or anyone that has switched from an enterprise tool to ReportsNow. What are the gaps, limitations? Do we still need to keep both tools?

Any insight would be appreciated,

Thanks!
 
antexity,

We use both COGNOS and ReportsNow. We see the products as aimed at different market segments.

Here is how we use both products:

ReportsNow is used by the accountants for ad hoc reporting and for reports that are of limited use outside the Finance Division.

COGNOS is used organisation wide and includes data from other systems (not just financial data) as well as JDE. It is used for Organisation wide reporting for the Executive and can include both financial and non financial data in the one report.
 
Reportsnow only inherit row and column security. For Dashboards to share you need mobie solution from reportsnow which is expensive. $600 per user
Aside that it is great product for JDE and you can use for other external data source.
Thanks
 
antexity,

We use both COGNOS and ReportsNow. We see the products as aimed at different market segments.

Here is how we use both products:

ReportsNow is used by the accountants for ad hoc reporting and for reports that are of limited use outside the Finance Division.

COGNOS is used organisation wide and includes data from other systems (not just financial data) as well as JDE. It is used for Organisation wide reporting for the Executive and can include both financial and non financial data in the one report.


Thanks for your reply peterbruce. My assumption for your Cognos solution you have a Data Warehouse and blend data from multiple sources which roll up to strategic dashboards and kpis? For your reportsnow you mainly use it for operational report. For operational reporting, what are some of the drawbacks you found? Creating custom calculations, joins etc?
 
Reportsnow only inherit row and column security. For Dashboards to share you need mobie solution from reportsnow which is expensive. $600 per user
Aside that it is great product for JDE and you can use for other external data source.
Thanks

Thank you Adeel for your reply, from what you are stating, the security you have in place for access to different applications, reportsnow doesn't leverage that security which I believe is most of the security that we have in place. That being said, did you still had a mini project to implement data security when you implemented reportsnow? How many user licenses do you have and how many mobie licenses do you have? Did you blend other data sources such as major systems? Did it require alot of effort?
 
Thank you Adeel for your reply, from what you are stating, the security you have in place for access to different applications, reportsnow doesn't leverage that security which I believe is most of the security that we have in place. That being said, did you still had a mini project to implement data security when you implemented reportsnow? How many user licenses do you have and how many mobie licenses do you have? Did you blend other data sources such as major systems? Did it require alot of effort?


No we did not have a project but we did thoroughly check and secured the data for rows and columns, (note you need to secure Address book as well) there is good a document from reportsnow about that and their support is amazing. we have 12 designers and 4 subscribers license for reportsnow and we did not go for mobie.
You can connect to any external data and we did for FMW and it does not required lots of effort. it is 5 minute setup in reportsnow server side connection and users need to change the column name as friendly name in this situation as reportsnow is the JDE reporting tool and give you the friendly column name automatically.

Hope this helps
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antexity,

Thanks for your reply peterbruce. My assumption for your Cognos solution you have a Data Warehouse and blend data from multiple sources which roll up to strategic dashboards and kpis? For your reportsnow you mainly use it for operational report. For operational reporting, what are some of the drawbacks you found? Creating custom calculations, joins etc?

Yes we do use a data warehouse as you mention.

I do not use ReportsNow, personally, so I cannot answer those questions.
 
Interesting conversation.

Is anyone still using Crystal, is it even still alive? - it used to be PeopleSoft's reporting engine for JDE at some point, I believe.

There's also our eXtreme Table Browser for simpler ad-hoc reports.

And another thought occurs: if the reporting logic can be coded into a NER, so that just calling it would produce a number or a few for immediate display, then this could probably cover some such needs too. Or is this too simple? Or too complicated?
 
Hey Alex,

yes we do all of our reporting through Crystal Reports / Business Objects. Its now owned by SAP.
The Peoplesoft connection from JDE to Crystal was a dog. We never used it. We go direct to secured database views that we created. Very high performance.

We have around 400 reports - mostly operational in nature - a couple of dashboard types. Interactive (run on demand) and scheduled with multiple methods of delivery.
We don't do any reporting in JDE UBEs unless its something we need to transform with BI Publisher. I can't imagine having to do basic reporting using UBEs anymore ...

There's really a ton of options / products out there now for people to get confused about. My
 
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