Reporting applications in companies are becoming increasingly complex. In SAP-oriented companies, up until a few years ago, often only SAP Business Explorer (BEx) was used as a standard tool. Although this tool has pronounced advantages, certain requirements, e.g. Dashboards and formatted reporting, could not be met or only carried out in an unsatisfactory manner.

In addition to the undisputable functional deficits of the SAP Business Explorer, certain other requirements, e.g. easier-to-use selection features („Point of View“) that basically, should have been able to be covered by the use of standard tools, were not supported either.

Following the acquisition of SAP BusinessObjects by SAP, the complexity of SAP Reporting solutions increased significantly. Various different front-end tools (e.g. SAP Dashboards, Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, SAP BusinessObjects) met reporting requirements in an exemplary manner. These solutions, however, did not offer other essential features, e.g. commenting. Worse yet: certain features, e.g. the selection of hierarchy nodes, was not supported or not sufficiently supported by these new tools.

In addition to this, in several companies, reporting tools of different vendors are used in lieu of ensuring a homogeneous environment in which work with standardized central features would be possible. Other manufacturers of reporting tools do not offer appropriate features of this kind either.

In order to meet these comprehensible and necessary expectations towards features, CubeServ developed the Reporting Framework, an add-on to SAP NetWeaver BW, SAP BusinessObjects, and SAP HANA as well as to non-SAP-reporting tools to support web-based professional reporting. The CubeServ Reporting Framework consists of the following components:

Unified Report Execution

• Point of View    
  Point of view hidden
  Point of view dialog
  Default value handling
  Value help
• Data interfaces
  Data Interface for Dashboard (Xcelsius)
  Data Interface for Crystal Reports    
• Commenting
  Commenting of report (book)
  Commenting of report (book) component (chapter)
  Commenting of single cells, rows, columns
• Publishing & Distribution 
  Worklist Maintenance
  Publishing & Scheduling
• Flexible Report Book         
  Flexible report book component horizontal scrolling
  Flexible report book creation 
• Mobile BI     
  Mobile component push report
  Mobile component online reports
  Mobile component point of view & controls

 
CubeServ’s Reporting Framework is continuously developed further.