Supercharging Sage X3 Reporting: Faster Insights, Easier Dashboards, Smarter Decisions
Sage X3 has long occupied the premier position among Sage’s family of ERP software solutions. But –just as a car owner might want some features not offered by the manufacturer, an X3 user might want some reporting features not natively offered by that app.
X3 incorporates good reporting features that are designed to meet many needs of a typical user. There are, however, limitations to its capabilities, and it’s important to know when and where you need to look beyond X3’s native reporting capabilities. This is especially true in areas such as ease of use, advanced analytics, and data blending.
DataSelf Analytics supercharges Sage X3 reporting to improve the following areas:
1. Report runtime.
- Sage X3 Reporting. With many X3 clients dealing with large datasets (e.g., customers, items, orders, etc.), the time it takes to generate reports can range from minutes and hours to days. High-volume data reports (such as transaction-based reports and those with sophisticated KPIs) are particularly prone to excessive runtimes.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf’s X3 reports and dashboards run in under ten seconds.
2. Report customization.
- Sage X3 Reporting: The customization of X3 reports requires technical expertise.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf’s “no code/low code/full code” report customization enables all users – regardless of technical expertise – to easily modify reports and dashboards. This means even non-technical users can easily find answers to their data questions without waiting for programmers or IT staff resources.
3. Instant Access to KPIs.
- Sage X3 Reporting: Many X3 reports and KPIs require manual processing to extract and manipulate a report’s data. For instance, a business analyst has to manually edit sales report data (at month’s end) to correctly calculate sales commissions and then has to export data to Excel (and manually make multiple adjustments) in order to accurately forecast and plan for inventory purchases for order fulfillments.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf’s powerful data warehousing module allows for the automation of sophisticated business rules that auto-create needed KPIs. Repetitive data extraction and transformation tasks are 100% automated, letting users focus on data analysis, and not on report preparation.
4. Ease of use.
- Sage X3 Reporting: Non-technical X3 users may find the user interface somewhat complex and non-intuitive; while drill-down, roll-up, and slice-and-dice features are limited.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf provides UI flexibility through its support of Microsoft Power BI™, Tableau™ and Microsoft Excel with industry standard navigation. DataSelf’s patented “Infinite Drill-Down” and “Dynamic Slice and Dice” support data manipulation down to transaction-level details. This enables users to easily customize their own reports without expert assistance.
5. Single version of the truth.
- Sage X3 Reporting: In X3, metrics and KPIs around such items as gross profit, inventory utilization, and cash flow projection are defined within each report, leading to inconsistent and contradictory statistics and insights – hindering managerial decision-making.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf uses centralized, server-based metric definition, enabling multiple reports to use the same KPI definition, and leading to the essential “single version of the truth” which is essential to corporate decision makers.
6. Integration and data blending.
- Sage X3 Reporting: Blending X3 data with other business apps and external data sets are limited and can be technically daunting.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf’s data warehouse enables no-code, real-time data blending for both legacy and live data sets such as from X3 and other data silos. DataSelf offers the choice of Power BI or Tableau (with report and dashboard templates for X3), as well as automated export to Excel and other formats.
7. Advanced analytics.
- Sage X3 Reporting: X3’s reporting is centered on historical activity; it focuses on audit trails and trend analysis. It includes limited predictive (or forecasted) analytics and lacks AI/ML capabilities such as contextual (natural-language) querying.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf includes a wide variety of predictive reporting, such as future inventory utilization and cash flow projections. Predictions are based on transactional history, with allowances for projected growth or decline, and one-time (or anomalous) variances. AI/ML capabilities are included, with user behavior learned and leveraged for future insight.
8. Automated distribution and alerts.
- Sage X3 Reporting: The generation of reports on demand and event-based (i.e., “triggered”) require technical expertise and are prone to performance (e.g., slow execution) issues.
- Sage X3 Plus DataSelf: DataSelf incorporates a report distribution module for the automated delivery of report output to the appropriate recipients, including delivery cancellation in case of no matching data. Conditional alerts based on data thresholds is also included. Business staff can, based on user rights, configure report distributions and alerts without expert assistance.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today.
