More efficient scheduling or setup? 3

[uba22]

I am inheriting a setup that I am surprised and confused about and would love to see if there is a way to improve the efficiency, so any help would be wonderful.

We have numerous reports set up that are scheduled to run with weekly distribution to different regional team leads. Each report appears to be set up correctly and uses parameters to pass in the unique team names to filter the data accordingly. But, each team has it's own "instance" of the report, with the unique parameters assigned to it.

To try to simplify what I am saying, there is a sales analysis run each Sunday night, distributed upon completion Monday morning. There are 5 regionals that need to see the report for their region. There are currently 5 sales analysis set up, each with their own region as a parameter value and their own schedule.

For example:
Region 1 - Sales_Analysis_East.rpt; param - {?region} = "east"
Region 2 - Sales_Analysis_South.rpt; param - {?region} = "south"
Region 3 - Sales_Analysis_North.rpt; param - {?region} = "north"
Region 4 - Sales_Analysis_West.rpt; param - {?region} = "west"
Region 5 - Sales_Analysis_Midwest.rpt; param - {?region} = "midwest"

Isn't there a way to set up 1 sales analysis and pass the parameters to it at scheduled run-time? The values passed to the parameters are all that change when the report runs. I was asked to make changes to some of the titles in the reports and I would prefer not to have to go into each report (there are numerous other reports set up like this as well, over 100 in total), in order to make them. There has to be a more efficient way to set up and distribute this using BOE. I have been told that this was the recommended setup to put in place and can't see how this can be the most efficient use of anyone's time to setup and especially maintain. The way it is set up right now, there are unique schedules AND unique reports for each subscriber.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

 

[IdoMillet]

If you look at the list of Report Managers at:

http://www.kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html

you'll find at least one other tool that supports report bursting.

- Ido

view, email, export, burst, distribute, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[hilfy]

Take a look at Profiles in BOE. They provide a way of filtering reports based on user group or user and I think bursting from within BOE. I'm just starting to investigate this topic for an upcomming project, so I don't have full info on how they work yet.

-Dell

A computer only does what you actually told it to do - not what you thought you told it to do.

 

[MJRBIM]

One of my clients has a very similar set-up for a number of different regions and branches.

Same 10 RPT Objects published in 70 different folders.

They have to maintain "individual" Instance history for each Object, and limit folder-access based on WinAD group membership.

When we need to update any of those same 10 RPT Objects, we make the change on the "Master Copy" then use the APOS OBJECT MANAGER (3rd-Party Tool) to promote it to all the other Region and Branche folders.

Senior Business Intelligence Consultant
Toronto, Canada

SeagateInfo 7 -> Crystal Enterprise -> BOE-XI (R2) / (R3.1) | Crystal ( 7 -> 2008) design | WebI design | Best practices for Java / .Net / Web Services

 

[TJOLIVER]

Hi

I agree - not nice to have to maintain 5 separate files. We use a tool call Report Miner. If you use a tool like this, you can compare code in each of the reports to determine fairly quickly if you could use just one version of the report and schedule it 5 times.