Eliminating Buyer’s Remorse: 6 Questions to Ask Before Buying BI Report Generation Software – Part 1 of 2

Boost productivity. Improve decision-making. Provide better service to internal and external customers. These three goals are what drive many organizations to look for business intelligence report automation software.

If you’re ready to invest in a software to automate your BI activities, you’ll find many products that -- on the surface –meet your criteria. Get them in your lab, though, and you’ll discover glaring differences that make some products rigid, more costly to maintain, and less likely to scale.

To avoid buyer’s remorse syndrome, here are six questions to ask when evaluating BI report generation and scheduling softwares.

Question #1: How does the software handle changes to BI report templates?
Inevitably, business users will want to change the look, feel, and information contained in their reports. Unfortunately, many products can’t handle these changes gracefully, leaving IT to manually rework jobs associated with a changed report template.

Forget, and some products will throw an error or simply generate the report using an old template. Either way, users won’t be happy and you’ll be fielding their calls. Even if you do remember to rework the jobs, there’s always a risk that a mistake will be made when manually deleting and re-adding scheduled jobs.

To reduce ongoing BI maintenance costs, you’ll want a BI report generation and scheduling software like ChristianSteven that eliminates rework. When a template changes, the software will automatically search for and refresh all jobs associated with it.

Question #2: Can the software be programmed to generate BI reports when an event occurs or value in a database changes?
It’s a mystery as to why very few BI report scheduling softwares support this feature, especially when you consider the impact that event-based scheduling can have on company performance and profits.

By switching from a time-based maintenance schedule to a ChristianSteven event-based schedule, Cessna Aircraft saves $200,000 annually on a single maintenance operation. Still other customers find event-based triggers useful for managing inventory, invoices, cash flow, and support tickets....things that can’t be scheduled on a calendar.

Question #3: What happens when “stuff goes wrong?”
Will business users receive blank reports, or is the system smart enough to detect and resolve the problem without human intervention? A big reason why you buy a BI report generation software is because you want to get out of the babysitting business, but you can’t do that entirely if the software you buy doesn’t automatically recover from everyday nuances.

With ChristianSteven you can create rules that tell it what to do when an error occurs and define failover procedures for added protection. If a job is taking too long to run, for example, ChristianSteven will automatically kill and restart the job.

ChristianSteven’s report scheduling and business process automation software works with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, Crystal Reports, and Microsoft Access. Watch online demos on YouTube or download your free, 30-day evaluation copy from the ChristianSteven website. Have a partnership question? Send an e-mail to partners@christiansteven.com.

Next month I’ll wrap up this story with 3 more questions to help you eliminate buyer’s remorse. Until then, I wish you and your family a healthy and happy holiday season!

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