I don’t know if you have noticed that in the past, enterprises engaged in IT emphasize on the system and process, but in recent years, IT related news, conferences, all around data.

Indeed, every company of any size is now emphasizing the importance of data. Regardless of whether IT is related to the IT industry or not, data is an essential part of IT. All kinds of data need database to carry and maintain (whether IT is large data warehouse, such as DB, or popular Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, etc.). Therefore, the role of a good DBA is extremely important. It not only needs to be able to carry out daily maintenance, but also is very important for the optimization of the database itself (including database system architecture optimization and SQL optimization) and the overall database architecture design. Many IT friends around me regard DBA as the position they have been striving for in the past five years.

But on the other hand, with the prominent value of data in recent years, IT departments of many enterprises are providing valuable data information to the business level and operation level of enterprises through data. The work of data is not only in data governance and planning, but also in the value of data mining to the operation and business. This is why in recent years many IT professionals have turned to data analysts, BI analysts, and even advanced data scientists.

Therefore, what IT people need to deal with now is not only database, but also BI reporting tools that can convert data into business decision information for data visualization.

Why do I need BI reporting tools?

In enterprise applications, once enterprises/organizations/groups become large, the amount of data is tens of thousands, and both data and reports need to be continuously updated through coordinated management. Faced with the data of major OA, ERP, CRM systems, friends who know IT at this time may know that the traditional Excel processing data is unable to hold, even if writing SQL can not stand the oncoming demand. Open reports or BI analysis tools are required to quickly generate reports, take numbers, and perform business analysis. FineReport is one of them.

FineReport is arguably the best business reporting software in the world:

• It can make reports quickly and flexibly, build a unified data decision-making and management platform, so that more data can be used for business operation and decision-making;
• Can quickly develop reports, can achieve seamless integration with all kinds of systems, speed up the development of the project, save the development of manpower and cost.

Story 1: Solved half a year’s financial workload in 7 days

Group, a subsidiary of a financial controller, each month report to group related production data analysis reports, points of the product, the summary, compared with the same period last year, compared with budget number, unit consumption and energy consumption (if the ban of sales prices may affect the unit price), ERP itself only the most basic business data, other nothing at all. It is really hard to work overtime for more than two weeks every month. Later, she went to our information department and communicated with her about her needs, hoping that we could help her automatically issue statements with codes. But even in code, these requirements need to be written for three days and repeated every month. If you misunderstand the logic, change it.

After more than a week of communication, she finally made this set of statements in FineReport. Now she only needs to input the date to see the analysis results of the current month, and click the variety to drill the detailed results of a single variety. Now she is very grateful to our IT department and feels that the IT staff has been respected.

Story 2: Data analysis, let the company anti – loss to win

Lao K has a subsidiary of the Group, whose sales performance and profitability have been poor, and even suffered losses in 2014. But the subsidiary is an important part of the group’s strategy, so we can only improve the business of the company. How do we do that?

Combined with the actual management situation of the company, the IT department used FineReport to build a data decision-making system and a data warehouse to provide a basis for data decision-making. Financial theme analysis, financial theme summary analysis, sales theme analysis, sales performance analysis, inventory theme, capital theme and other modules.

Then, Old K pulled the financial data of the subsidiary and made a detailed analysis: which products made money? Which clients make money? Which salespeople make money? It was a big find: fewer than 30 of the 49 products were profitable; Less than 20 per cent of downstream companies generate profits for their subsidiaries; Only 57 percent of salespeople make more profit for the company. Therefore, Mr. K reported such a conclusion to the superior leadership and immediately carried out reforms from the three perspectives of product, customer and salesman, cutting 20% of the low-margin products; Focus on maintaining the top 30% of sales; Adjust the distribution method of sales profit.

Effect of reform: sales volume increased by 13.5 million yuan in 2016, sales expense ratio decreased by 4.55%, profit of 2016 was 9.16 million yuan, 4.57 million yuan more than that of 2015, profit growth came from sales growth, and profit of two years was 15.32 million yuan.

As can be seen above, reporting /BI tools can bring real value to the business when used well.

“FineReport+” three technical advantages

FineReport, for example, is essentially a general-purpose report making and data visualization tool. Just like Excel, it can store statistics, make various charts and dashboards, and it can make financial statements and develop purchase, sale and inventory systems.

1. FineReport+ business system breaks the data barrier

The report capacity of general business system is very weak, which is difficult to meet the needs of enterprise data analysis and management. In OA system, for example, with the development of enterprise application, OA software is more and more attention to data analysis and use of data analysis can be formed not only the management of information and processes, more to realize the effective management and use of enterprise data, so the report application has increasingly become the enterprise office automation software (collaborative office software) is one of the most important component. However, OA’s own report has many congenital defects:

A. The data are all from OA system, and the report is subordinate to OA function. For example, it is relatively simple and fixed to count the number of receipts and documents issued by each department and the attendance day of employees, both in terms of format and statistical content, which cannot reflect the correlation analysis of all kinds of data from a comprehensive perspective.

B. Reports made by manufacturers or service providers for users during implementation. Users may request that the implementation service provider complete the report development. Although this approach can better meet the needs of users, it is far from flexible enough to be on-demand for the development of subsequent businesses.

Therefore, when product software companies meet customers with reporting requirements, they often choose to cooperate with Fansoft, such as Yonyou, Kingdee, Fanwei, Zhiyuan, Wanhu, Lanling, Digital China, and Wave. The business system products integrated with FineReport include OA, ERP, MIS, CRM, TMS, WMS, BPM, EHR, attendance, etc.

For end users, FineReport can make reports quickly and flexibly, and build a unified data decision-making and management platform, so that more data can be used for business operation and decision-making, so that the business system can play a greater value.

In general, FineReport solves the following problems:

• The changing market environment and business requirements cannot quickly meet the changing reporting requirements
• The traditional SQL+Excel way to integrate data to make reports, low efficiency and poor accuracy
• Service system data is too scattered to form data islands, which are difficult to use effectively
• Lack of unified report management portal, unable to form a global data vision, assist decision-making

2. FineReport+BI system to create a data analysis platform

The boundary between report form and BI is unclear, how to match and apply? Here are two examples.

After the completion of the data platform construction of Northeast Securities, the unified collection of structured data has been initially realized, and data reports and charts can be visualized through Cognos tools. However, Cognos is cumbersome to use and complex to develop, and data teams have been unable to take over the tool, while new needs have emerged to save structured data generated during work in a system that replaces Excel’s model of recording and reporting data. Therefore, Northeast Securities finally bought FineReport, which solved the current data filling and other analysis needs more perfectly.

Dahua Technology Co., Ltd. built a data analysis platform with Qlikview, but when their report demand broke out, Qlikview could not solve the problem. The final solution is to introduce finerePort, which is used in parallel with QlikView. QlikView is used by several members of the leadership, and finereport is used by the middle management. FineReport is a specialized reporting software that far outperforms QlikView in ease of use, speed and responsiveness to complex reports.

Therefore, FineReport+BI system wins in the development efficiency and the positioning of middle-level, fixed and complex reports. Whether traditional BI such as SAP BO, Cognos, Oracle BIEE, etc., or new self-service BI such as Tableau, FineBI, Qlikview, PowerBI, etc., FineReport can be “+”.

3, FineReport+ scene requirements, customized personalized business system

The essence of information system is input and display. FineReport naturally supports these two functions and is itself a DIY visual system tool. Therefore, many users directly use FineReport to develop some business systems, such as simple check-in and check-out system, project weekly report management system, hotel room income data system, examination analysis system, membership management system, card attendance system, meal report system, wechat little secretary, etc.

At present, there are more and more demands for large-screen data display, which is generally applied to industry expo center, real-time monitoring center, group conference center, strategic command center and other scenes, with increasingly high requirements for visual effects. With FineReport, you can easily create a cool management cockpit without having to customize it. It supports visualization and centralized control of data published to a large screen of multiple scenes.

A CIO said well, in the past, IT is the support department in any enterprise, always running behind the business, data let IT people have measurable value, is a lifeline. BI/ reporting tool is a good machine to help IT to produce and manage reports more efficiently. From spending more time on data analysis, business analysis projects, so that the value of IT people really highlighted.