Analytics & Reporting in CloudSuite Service Industries

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

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

Infor EPM Documentation

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.

Want to learn more?

There are several reporting and analytics tools to choose from.