How to Select Reporting Software

Reporting is the life blood of any business, enabling management to have all the information available to make strategic and tactical decisions. It's an essential element of a business decision support system. In its simplest form, reporting software extracts data from multiple sources and presents it in formats that are easy to read and analyze. Additionally, it may provide support for easy layout design, multiple languages and distribution mechanisms.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Decide the scope of your requirements. Reporting software products are available for individual desktop reporting needs to enterprise wide distributed reporting situations. For simple desktop reporting, Microsoft Excel could be good enough. However, a large corporation would need Crystal Reports (see Resources below).
2. Determine the functional modules you would need. Some products come in multiple versions, each targeted at a set of functional requirements. For instance, Business Objects, the maker of Crystal Reports, offers multiple products. Crystal Reports is report-generation software, Crystal Reports Server is a report creation and secure distribution server and Crystal Reports Viewer is a lightweight viewer capable of viewing any report generated with a Crystal Report product.
3. Investigate whether there are existing applications with which your reporting software must work. Some reporting products are developed on top of specific databases or enterprise applications. For example, Microsoft SQL Server Report is developed primarily to work on top of SQL Server database and Oracle XML Publisher works on Oracle Enterprise applications like Oracle Financial, Oracle J.D. Edwards and Oracle Peoplesoft. If your organization has standardized on such a database or application, you should select the reporting software that goes with it.
4. Find out the budget for the new software. There will be different budgetary limitations on the initial purchase, licensing and support. If you are the one setting the budget, factor in all these elements, and add any additional temporary or permanent manpower you will need in order to install, integrate and support the new reporting software. Additionally, the users of the new software will need training, which will have an associated cost.
5. Create a short-list of vendors, based on your requirement specifications and how well each product matches up to them.
6. Contact vendors for any additional information that you need, such as pricing, support and delivery timeframes. Ask vendors to provide a demonstration of their software. If you have an existing business relationship with a vendor or your need is for multiple products, you may be eligible for discounted licensing fees. Even otherwise, you can negotiate a better fee structure than originally quoted.
7. Select and place your purchase order based on how well each product matches up to your requirement specifications.

Tips & Warnings

• If you end up with multiple vendors who meet all your requirements, select the one who has the best track record and reputation in providing support.
• Even though you want to acquire the best technology, put business needs ahead of technology without rejecting the foresight you have about the future needs of your company and how a newer technology can help provide better reporting.

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