Yesterday I talked about ERP, and the response was good, so I take this opportunity to talk about the report system closely related to ERP.

Recently, a friend of mine complained to me that he was from a traditional enterprise. His company wanted to transform, but the reporting system was stumped in the first step. He said that he envied us so much that he would like to take this opportunity to talk to you about it.

With the development of enterprise informatization, more and more kinds of data are generated, and the demand for statements is also surging. Business demands are raised every day, and the development of statements is working overtime every day. As time goes by, the operating efficiency of enterprises is reduced. Many enterprises are eager to build a perfect report system to solve the problem of report development and management.

In the traditional enterprise report building, it is more common to use Excel to make tables manually, but this way is too primitive and inefficient. It is difficult to find scattered data, and it is even more difficult to conduct a comprehensive analysis. It takes half a day to make a table, and if the demand is slightly changed, it may have to start all over again. The flexibility is poor.

Almost 90 percent of enterprises have encountered such problems, the better solution is to build a report system to unify the development and management of reports. Generally speaking, there are two ways for enterprises to build reporting systems, one is open source tools or combined with code development. I have also seen that limited companies use Python to do automatic reporting, and the other is to use relatively mature commercial reporting tools, such as crystal, such as FineReport.

Compared with traditional Excel, open source tools have indeed improved the efficiency of making tables. However, most of the open source tools are foreign software, with few Chinese learning materials and high cost for developers. In addition, there is no service guarantee for open source tools, and it is a great risk to the construction and online operation of the entire enterprise reporting system when technical difficulties and product bugs are blocked.

Relatively speaking, using commercial reporting tools to build reporting system is a good choice, but tools bloom, the corresponding levels of functions and requirements are not uniform, reporting requirements are already many and not unified, so in the selection of time to consider their own situation.

In fact, a perfect enterprise report system, the focus in two links: one is report design, the second is report management. Therefore, when choosing report tools to build a system, we should focus on these two points: report design function is not powerful, can adapt to a variety of report needs; After the completion of the report design, the later maintenance and iteration is not convenient.

I have come into contact with many report integration projects, and FineReport of Domestic Fansoft is widely used, because it has rich functions and components, and has certain openness, which can solve many complicated and strange report requirements. Secondly, the product is easy to use to save a lot of learning costs, interface documents are rich, custom development and integration are very convenient; In report management, permissions are important for data security and the flow of data and reports. So let’s talk about it.

I. Report design

1, zero code, drag tabulation

When it comes to making statements, the efficiency of making statements is certainly something we should be concerned about (people who need to work overtime to make statements are worried about ah), such as the management costs of reporting to the manager, involving a lot of functional formulas, hundreds of detailed fields, the right person is dazzling, and every month to summarize once. This reporting tool can take as little as an hour to create a fixed template, because FineReport reports on data fields rather than specific data, and table extensions are based on fields. Most operations can be completed by dragging and dropping, the key is to do a template every time, when the connected data source will be updated automatically, according to the time or set some conditions to filter, do report every month as long as the filter.

2, three design methods to meet a variety of tabulation needs

We report developers in the work, often receive a variety of report requirements, so when choosing tools must consider whether the tool can adapt to a variety of report requirements. FineReport has three report modes: general report, aggregate report and decision report, which can basically solve the report needs of most departments.

Ordinary report mode, using the style of Excel, basically can use Excel can be used, generally used to do some routine grouping table, cross table and so on.

Aggregate report mode, generally used to do some large irregular reports. For irregular reports like the following, if we use Excel to make them, we have to constantly merge and split cells, which is very troublesome. If we use FineReport’s aggregated report mode, it will be much more convenient, because it adopts the canvas design, each module is independent of each other, and can be completed by dragging each module on the canvas.

There is also a decision report mode, generally used to do some cockpit, management kanban, etc., for example, the following is a management kanban I do with FineReport, drag the desired visual chart components to the canvas can form a comprehensive analysis kanban, very convenient.

3. Remote design and multi-person collaboration

Normally, report designer installed in our report on the developer’s computer, but the deployment project server is on another computer, this kind of situation will put the project designer and statements in the same machine, and then we’ll go to modify, remote file operation, but not often remote desktop card, experience is very poor, Moreover, the installation of designer on the server also increases the maintenance difficulty of the administrator, but also reduces the security of the server. If FineReport is deployed, you can use its remote design capabilities to design directly locally, publish templates remotely, and change server short report files directly.

In addition to the remote design, we often encounter the situation that several people need to work together to make tables. Each person is responsible for a part of the report project, and sometimes others’ reports are needed. At this time, FineReport can connect several report developers to the same report running environment. Then use permissions to control the scope of files that each person can manipulate to ensure security. In addition, if you are concerned that several people editing a file at the same time will cause conflicts, you can lock the template file to prevent others from changing the template.

4, support a variety of data sources

Nowadays, an enterprise generally has several business systems, such as CRM, ERP, OA, etc., and business data are scattered in these independent systems. If you want to find data, you have to enter different systems, which is very troublesome. If there is a platform that can connect these systems and get through the data, it will be much more convenient to take data. FineReport can play this role by supporting multiple data sources, defining multiple data sets in a single report, and pulling data from different databases into a single table.

5. Data query and filtering

In the enterprise report application, after the report is done, it is often necessary to meet the query needs of other departments. Every day, someone comes to the data, which requires report products to facilitate the query of data. For example, the financial department often needs to check the annual financial report over the years. In the past, the data of each year may be summarized separately into a table, but in FineReport, annual data can be queried by setting the parameters of the year. After setting the parameters in the parameter panel, the corresponding data can be retrieved by selecting the year to be queried.

6. Data filling

In daily work, the traditional report form is generally data presentation, which takes out the data from the database and shows it in various charts. However, in many cases, we need to add or modify the data in the database. For example, the personnel department often needs to input or modify the employee information. For such requirements, finereport can be used to fill in the report form. You can add or delete data directly from the database through reports. In order to avoid some wrong data into the database, you can set conditions to check the data filled in.

Second, report management

1. User rights management

The above has solved the problem of making statements, the following is to solve the problem of looking at statements. Under normal circumstances, the statements developed by enterprises are embedded in each system, and the leaders who want to see the statements have to adjust from each system, which is time-consuming and laborious. The best solution is to build an enterprise report management platform, through a unified application access to each system.

FineReport has a built-in data decision-making system, which can directly manage user permissions, system resources, configuration and other unified management in FineReport. Leaders and business personnel at all levels can see all reports within their jurisdiction through a portal system.

2. Timing scheduling function

Usually, in order to timely obtain all aspects of data and information, management personnel will require business departments to submit daily and weekly reports, which will add a lot of workload to business personnel. At this point, FineReport’s scheduled scheduling function can be used to regularly generate weekly and daily issues. There is no need to make tables repeatedly. After a scheduled task is set, the server can generate reports by itself at the set time and send reports to leaders by email or SMS.

3. Mobile platforms

Most reports refer to many enterprises is currently rely on PC, but for the leadership of the decision-makers, they travel a lot, a lot of time on the on the road, can’t view the PC report in time, sometimes will miss the best opportunity to adjust the business problem, thus statements mobile also has become the trend of many enterprises, FR also ADAPTS to the new demand of the enterprise, providing the function of mobile terminal report, which can be integrated with the existing mobile office platforms of the enterprise, such as wechat and Dingding. After integration, the message of report viewing can be pushed to the wechat and Dingding of the leader, so that the leader can view the report timely and will not miss important information.

Third, summary

In fact, the enterprise report system is not so difficult to build, the core of the report system is the processing and presentation of data, choose the right report tool is bound to get twice the result with half the effort. But want to perfect reporting system is not a single tool or system can solve, reporting system depends on not only due to tool ability, but also rely on the enterprise data management ability, each enterprise data management ability is different, the same tools in the different enterprise applications that also differ in thousands ways, good horse matchs good saddle.