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Analytics & Reporting in CloudSuite Service Industries

Overview 

Infor’s CloudSuite Service Industries (CSSI) reporting and analytics platform offers a robust and comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities designed to help businesses manage, analyze, and visualize their data. Customers using CSSI applications typically require a variety of reports to manage and analyze their business processes effectively. Common types of reports delivered and supported include: 

  • Operational Reports 
  • Configurable Ad-hoc Reports 
  • Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Financial Reporting 
  • Analytics Platform for CloudSuites (CloudSuite Analytics) 
  • Birst Enterprise 
  • API Support 
  • SQL Support 

Key Concepts and Definitions 

Term Description 
Operational Reports Focuses on the day-to-day operations of an organization.  Provides real-time information about the current state of business processes. Uses Infor delivered reports or create custom reports. 
Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Financial consolidation reports. Capital expenses planning. 
Configurable Ad-Hoc Reports Create reports on the fly. Microsoft Excel integrations allow you to download cloud data to the desktop, or upload from the desktop to the cloud server. Easy to use – no IT programming resources needed. 
Infor Analytics Platform for CloudSuites  (CloudSuite Analytics) End-to-end, enterprise-caliber analytics tool. Automatically delivered with your applications – no additional license required. Delivers industry-specific business intelligence and role-based analytics content to enable business decisions.  Delivers ETL data models designed by core application data experts.  Inherits application security policies.  Delivers pre-built content including: Dashboards. Charts. Tables. Geo maps. KPIs – key performance indicators.  Support for presentation in a browser or mobile app. 
Birst Technology (Birst Enterprise) The technology layer that hosts CloudSuite Analytics. Upgrade option – requires an additional license. 
Automated Data 
Refinement (ADR) 		Patented technology that automates the process of creating a robust dimensional model and semantic layer. 
Networked BI Patented technology that brings both centralized and decentralized data together to provide governed data in an agile environment. 
Semantic Layer A business representation of complex company data for end-user consumption. 
Orchestration Provides a module to create and manage workflows for data extraction, processing, and space operations. 
Enterprise Space Enable complex, scalable data management with dimension data models. 
Professional Space Relational data model with low code, no-code self-service data preparation. 
Birst Query Language (BQL) A proprietary logical query language for defining expressions. 
Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) A process in database usage, especially in data warehousing, that involves extracting data from outside sources, transforming it to fit operational needs, and loading it into the target database or user-data store (warehouse). 

Operational Reports 

Operational reporting focuses on the day-to-day operations of an organization. It provides real-time or near-real-time information about the current state of business processes. 

Operational reports provide powerful and immediate access to live transactional data, provide timely reporting responses to daily operational questions, and provide the global business community with the ability to manage daily tasks efficiently, ensuring smooth business operations. 

Features and Tools 

  • Real-Time Data: Provides up-to-the-minute data for immediate decision-making. 
  • Detailed Transactional Data: Focuses on specific transactions, such as sales orders, purchase orders, staffing, inventory levels, etc. 
  • Operational Dashboards and Alerts: Includes dashboards and alerts to monitor real-time business transactions, one-click access to exception reporting, drill down and drill across access to related reports, and up-to-the-moment critical metrics you need to make on-the-spot business decisions. 
  • Infor Delivered Reports: Delivers Out-of-the-box (OOTB) operational reports that meet industry standard reporting and compliance requirements for daily business processing. 
  • Application-Specific Reporting: Delivers OOTB reporting specific to your business’ daily processing from various applications, including finance, HR, workforce management, supply chain, and manufacturing. 
  • Quick data export: Export data to Excel and PDF formats, getting data down from the cloud to your local environment. Many applications also support uploads from Excel to the cloud database. 
  • Delivered Security Models: Configurable OOTB security models to enforce data protection, confidentiality, integrity, compliance, internal controls, and trust. 
  • Audit Reporting: Standardized audit reports to ensure regulatory compliance, financial transparency and accuracy, and corporate governance.  
  • Report Catalog: Access all delivered and configured reports in the system, filter by application, and favorite the reports you access most often. 

Use Cases 

  • Daily Sales Reports: Monitoring daily sales performance. 
  • Inventory Management: Checking current inventory status to manage stock effectively. 
  • Order Tracking: Tracking the status of customer orders in real-time. 
  • Production Monitoring: Monitoring production processes to ensure they are running smoothly. 
  • Financial and Payables Processing: Real-time visibility into cash flow, invoice payments, vendor activity, and financial data. 

Configurable Ad-Hoc Reports 

Many reporting needs can be met using Infor-delivered reports. However, many organizations need configurable ad hoc reporting tools to meet their unique reporting requirements.  

Infor provides several report development tools and platforms that allow your business to create configured reports tailored to your specific business needs. Reporting development tools range from quick and easy to complex to meet the needs of your custom reporting requirements and the skill sets of your employees. 

Features and Tools: 

  • Excel Integration: Create ad-hoc Excel reports that don’t require extensive technical knowledge or assistance from the IT department.  
  • Configurable Reports: Convert data on a screen to a report that can be configured.  Add or remove fields, change labels, schedule reports, and share reports with your colleagues.  
  • Copy or Create Analytic Reports:  Copy and modify delivered analytic reports, visualizations, or dashboards. Create simple or complex analytic reports from scratch using the Birst technology platform.   
  • Advanced Reporting Tools: Extract data from the Infor Data Lake using a variety of tools including SQL-based Compass queries, Compass query APIs, Data Lake APIs, and Compass JDBC Drivers.  

Enterprise Performance Management 

Gain a complete, real-time view of your financial business performance with Infor Enterprise Performance Management (EPM).  

Many organizations still perform budgeting and planning in error-prone spreadsheet silos that consume a significant amount of time, money, and resources on highly manual processes. Modern EPM software can help reduce errors and enable enterprise-wide collaboration with an integrated, closed-loop approach. 

Infor Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is a modern, mobile-enabled financial performance management and business intelligence platform that provides a complete range of integrated enterprise performance management capabilities that let you report with confidence.  

Infor EPM can be tightly integrated into an organization’s enterprise data sources via the Infor OS data fabric; it can also leverage additional advanced industry analytics capabilities with CloudSuite Analytics powered by Birst®. 

Features and Tools: 

  • Financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting: Create budgets and plans, forecasts, and operational and strategic plans. 
  • Financial Consolidation Reports: Standardized reporting tools for Income Statements, Assets, Liabilities, P&L, Cash Flow, Budgeting & Planning, account analysis, and audit trails. 
  • Capital expenses planning: Manage capital with documentation packages, an overview of statuses, and approval. 

Additional Resources for EPM Reporting: 

Enterprise Performance Management | EPM software | Infor 

https://docs.infor.com/depm/10.6.0/en-us/depmug/default.html?helpcontent=c_overview.html

CloudSuite Analytics  

CloudSuite Analytics delivers industry-specific role-based business intelligence that provides business insight into past, present, and future trends. Driven by Birst technology, these pre-built insights enable your teams to make intelligent business decisions.  

Delivered pre-built content includes the following: 

  • Application data model 
  • Dashboards 
  • Charts 
  • Tables 
  • Geo maps 
  • KPIs – key performance indicators  

Within CloudSuite Analytics, customers can change any report, dashboards, KPIs, metrics, subject areas, metadata, orchestration & pre-built data model (add fields from CloudSuite – user defined fields). 

Infor does not recommend changing content delivered by Infor.  Instead, it’s recommended to copy the object and make updates to the copied object.  This will prevent potential disruption when content updates are applied.   

**CloudSuite Analytics does not allow for importing data from different sources. 

**CloudSuite Analytics is only available in the Multi-tenant cloud and is not supported for on-premise deployments. 

Inventory Manager Dashboard 

Birst Enterprise 

Birst Enterprise is an upgrade option available as a multi-tenant cloud architecture.  Customers who purchase the Birst Enterprise upgrade option can use all the standard CloudSuite Analytics features and the following additional capabilities: 

  • Connect to additional Infor and 3rd party data sources, combining data into a single source-of-truth BI solution. 
  • Add users outside of Cloudsuite. 
  • Connect to external content from other web pages to enhance the end-user experience. 

The Birst Networked BI platform combines the capability, scale, and data governance required for enterprise data with data from end users to create a blended data platform.  

The Birst Connectivity Framework provides access to data in the enterprise, whether in an existing data warehouse, in flat or structured files, or in cloud business applications.  

Birst extracts data from those sources then organizes it and models it into a user data store, making the data ready for analysis. Birst does this using Automated Data Refinement (ADR) and a transformation language (ETL) to merge data, create scripts, and publish to the data store. The data store unifies your data from multiple sources, refines it for business use, and provides a consistent view of all data to all users. The data store is used to create and configure your own reports, visualizations, and dashboards. 

API Support 

Infor’s reporting and analytics platform provides advanced API support for operational transactional data and replicated data in the Data Lake. APIs can also be used for data integrations between systems. 

Click here for Infor API documentation. 

SQL Support 

Data Lake Compass query functionality provides robust query capabilities to search and extract results from data stored in Data Lake. 

Query functionality is available through the Compass UI in Data Fabric, the Infor OS Compass API endpoint, and the Compass JDBC driver. 

Click here for Data Lake & Compass SQL documentation. 

Want to learn more? 

There are several reporting and analytics tools to choose from. 

Reference Guides 

For Birst technical reference, check out the Analytics Cheat Sheet. 

Topical Videos 

Need information on a specific feature or function or a quick overview? These short videos may be just what you are looking for. Check out our Infor Analytics playlist on YouTube. 

Product Documentation 

Documentation for all Infor products, including reports and analytics, is available on Infor’s documentation website. 

Click here to access Infor’s Documentation Website. 

Infor Community 

Interested in collaborating with others in your industry? Joining a community is a great way to learn and help others.  

There are several to choose from! Here’s a few that can get you started, and there are many more to choose from. 

Join the Infor Birst Community  

Join the FSM (CSF) & HR Talent (HCM) Community 

Join the M3 Customer & Partner Community 

Infor U Courses 

Infor U offers prescriptive industry-specific learning paths that combine video-based and instructor-led training. If you are an Infor customer, then check out courses on Infor U.