Reporting
There are three distinct parts of reporting in IFS Applications
- Operational Reporting - Output information on paper or in
electronic documents as part of a business process (e.g. invoices, order
confirmations, ...).
- Ad-hoc Reporting - A way to visualize data to be able to
facilitate decision making, often includes aggregations and graphs.
Essentially basic Business Intelligence (BI) support and run on demand by a
user rather than as part of a business process (e.g. monthly sales
statistics per region).
- Information Access Layer - A way to assemble/aggregate data from
various locations in to one view more suitable for analyzing or presenting
the data.
In the above definitions it would be natural to include
Business Intelligence (BI),
which provides both additional ad-hoc reporting/analysis capabilities as well as
Information Sources (partly overlapping the functionality of Information Access
Layers). We have decided to keep them separate but linked together. This is
mainly because the IFS Applications BI solution is an optional component not
always available, opposed to the reporting capabilities that are included in the
standard IFS Applications runtime framework.
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