Business Reporter allows users to create powerful reports
in Excel making use of a combination of core Excel and Business Reporter
functionality.
There is always a trade-off between the complexity and
performance of a report designed using any reporting tool. Business Reporter is
no different. Based on performance benchmarking tests, Business Reporter works
well when rendering up to 400k cells.
More data can be processed but performance and reliability will become an
issue. Excel while very flexible, renders each cell individually and so as more
rows and columns are added, processing times increase quickly. This limit is
acceptable for the use cases for which Business Reporter is meant for, namely
financial reporting & planning with writeback to IFS. The above benchmarks are
the performance levels that can be achieved under ideal conditions and with good
design practices. Actual performance may vary depending on the specific
configuration and usage scenario eg: heavy use of excel features such as Excel
formulas, BR features such as sheet repeaters, pivots in non-BR sheets etc.
As the data culture of your organization matures, it is
important to choose tools that can scale with large amounts of data, help you
gain insights, and make data-driven decisions. IFS Advanced Analytics and IFS
Analysis models use the same Information Sources as IFS Business Reporter. They
have prebuilt content and are designed to be easy to tailor to your business
needs. They allow you to access much larger data sets and process this data far
more quickly.