As an ERP system, Prophet 21® clearly offers wholesale distributors a lot of value for many different reasons. The platform creates the central nervous system for these types of businesses, enabling them to manage incredibly diverse inventory.
But to really get the most out of P21™, you need to customize it to your company’s requirements—and that requires highly specialized expertise in SQL databases and complex data. One prime example: reporting. We have customers that relied on P21™ for almost a decade, all the while struggling to generate the weekly or monthly reports that ought to provide insights into the performance of their businesses.
We live and work in the Information Age. Success or failure hinges on analyzing the right information at your disposal to make the best decisions. While gathering and storing data presents some technical challenges on the back end, these only matter if the information can ultimately get delivered to leaders in a format they can use.
Companies of all sizes face this strategic business challenge—and opportunity—with their data. How can you streamline the process by which data becomes insights, so you make better, faster decisions?
Unlocking Value in Data
Data locked inside servers represents untapped value. For companies under competitive pressure to operate as efficiently as possible, P21 data can deliver a strategic advantage. Powerful business intelligence applications like Crystal Reports give you a set of keys, if you’re able to use them, enabling new reports for better insights.
They also improve productivity. For one customer, we developed a way to query the P21 database for scores of industrial part inventories at its customer locations, which saved a full day of work each week generating invoices. This type of automation alleviates all kinds of tedious manual work with data.
But what do you do with these reports? We prefer to deliver these reports via centralized web portal. rePORTAL lets our customers view, manage, distribute and schedule Crystal Reports, all within their browser.
P21 Reports Made Easy
We’ve found rePORTAL greatly simplifies how customers access and use vital reports from P21. User logins dynamically control access to various reports, either on a group or an individual user basis. rePORTAL makes it easy to create standard reports from any SQL query script into PDF, CSV, XML or even HTML, and distribute them to multiple emails, printers or web sites—whatever workflow best works for the customer. We often batch multiple reports at once for customers, such as at month end.
When you combine knowledge of SQL querying in Crystal Reports and rePORTAL, opportunities quickly emerge to better understand and share the wealth of data inside P21 to those leaders in your business who need it most. Not only does it lay the groundwork for more informed decisions, but it streamlines otherwise manual tasks.
Learn More
If you would like to hear more about how we use Crystal Reports and rePORTAL, get in touch. We would love to explore how they can help your business.