Like many of us, throughout my career I have the necessity to pull data from a system or systems and then actively combine the extracts in Excel using complex formulas to find an answer, this has become the standard for most people.
Excel is now widely accepted as the go-to solution, we have spent the time to learn formulas and other functions to get the answers we need, it is almost like a comfy blanket; but when you quickly need an answer to a question, it can be very time consuming to extract the data and transform it to something useful.
To add to this challenge, if you need to do it on a monthly or even weekly basis, it becomes a time-consuming task that you do on autopilot, after a while you don’t even think about it anymore.
If this sounds like you… there is a solution you might be interested in.
Discovering Data Access Studio
Data Access Studio is a reporting tool. It has access to all your JD Edwards tables and views, but more than that it also has the capability to effortlessly create external connections. These connections can be to Excel, SQL databases or Oracle databases. As a designer you can create your own table joins and table lookups.
This gives you the ability to combine data from other systems to create a holistic view of your company and processes.
Data Access Studio or DAS, uses live data for the reporting. You can easily create table style report for operations, but it is so much more than that.
With DAS you can create dashboards that can be published to Mobie and is accessible from mobile devices.
You can create Executive style reports with Pro Reports and even schedule these reports and distribute them via e-mail or saved to a network location.
And for all the die-hard Excel fans, the formulas in DAS have an Excel feel to how they work so it is easy to learn.
There are so many fantastic calculations in DAS to make creating reports and combining information easy. Calculations like unit of measure conversions.
Have you ever tried to create a report where you needed to convert the unit of measure on the transactions to a single unit of measure? This can be a very difficult task in reporting. With DAS they have a built-in unit of measure conversion calculation that works exactly like JD Edwards. And best of all it takes less than 2 minutes to setup. It has the capability to select a single measure for the output or you can use a variable. That means you can create one report that is capable of showing the quantities in multiple measures, simply by changing the parameter to the UOM that you require. You can even make the column heading dynamic to change as the UOM changes.
DAS has a bursting calculation that not only can e-mail the reports or save them to network locations, but you can use a burst calculation to pull information from a sub-report into your main report.
DAS has pre-built drill-down capability, but you can also create your own. This functionality allows you to drill down into the details of a report. Think about a trial balance. If a value doesn’t look correct, you can use the drill-down function to review all the transactions that make up that balance.
Would you like to see it in more detail? Contact Quistor and request a demo!
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