To use RW100 or some other reporting methods

I have been asked to support my GL team where they have some old RW100 reports that have become obsolete. The reports produce so much data that it takes them 45 minutes per day to filter out just the data they need. No one in Finance knows how to create RW reports so they have asked me for help.

I have never used the RW reporting in Lawson and would like to inquire some opinions on whether I would be better of using SSRS or some other service to create their reports or should I learn RW and either update their current RW100 reporting or write new RW100 reports?

I am thinking there are newer tool sets that would probably do a better and faster job of creating the reports but wanted to get some opinions from some more seasoned veterans on this.

Thanks in advance for any opinions.

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unknown

There are better solutions than RW100. One is using Crystal Reports, either to enhance RW100 reports, or to replace them entirely. Lawson's LBI is a Crystal Reports wrapper, with all sorts of links to native Lawson for republishing reports, enhancing them, creating all-new reports, or using other functionality like Smart Notifications. There are other Crystal Reports wrappers, such as InfoView, which are cheaper but have less hooks into Lawson. You can also purchase cube-based reporting solutions, such as Oracle Hyperion Budgeting and Planning. Personally, have worked with LBI entensively, I think LBI is a great solution for a Crystal Reports wrapper that also has very powerful scheduling and security functionality.

unknown

I think a lot will depend on how your company(ies), your chart of accounts are structured and your proficiency in the other tools and what style RW report it is (Account, Level, Both type - style 1, 2, or 3) because those will indicate the complexity. There's a lot of table joining involved in recreating an RW100 report - amounts tables, budget tables, chart account descriptions tables, maybe commitments tables, and chart section names tables, GL Names tables so it does become complex to rewrite in my experience with a lot of verification time - my skills with this are largely on the job figuring out so possibly some of that can be avoided. If reports are similar enough, this could be worthwhile, especially since RW is supposed to be gone in xi. RW training is 4 days so that should be considered also. I do think you want to look at what you need the reports to do - straightforward reports - account and level type - are pretty straightforward in RW and can be pretty easily maintained - certainly create fewer formulas in RW.

tom

Anyone have experience with "Spreadsheet Server" from Global Software. One of my consultant companies recommended this as a solution.

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unknown

I agree with JFichter. And MiloTsukroff. The question is kind of like asking people's opinion on a Honda Accord and whether there is something better out there. The answer, I think, is that it depends on what you are looking for. For someone with knowledge of Lawson GL, RW100 should be fairly easy to set up and do some basic or even moderate reporting. You can distribute to other user's print managers or even have them print automatically. You can do some basic computations, basic formatting, etc., but the bigger win is that it references the chart of accounts, your GL level structure, custom accounting groups, custom level groups, GLAMOUNTS, etc. without having to do all of the setup and know the tables. It's not perfect...parts of RW100 are hard to learn, and it is 15-20 (or more?) years old, so it is certainly limited in what it can do when compared to some of the newer internal (LBI) or external (Crystal, other 3rd parties) tools. Again, just depends on what kind of data your GL team wants.

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