Crystal Reports Conversion to SSRS for Centralized and Reliable Reporting [Case Study]
10 Nov 2021
The use of technology enables civil service organizations to work with citizens efficiently and effectively while making the agency and community thrive. And, a dedicated centralized reporting software offers them an invaluable competitive advantage to track, manage and stay in compliance to efficiently and powerfully manage smart government operations. With changing times, the technology needs to upgrade to streamline workflow, improve communication and increase productivity from desk to field. Further, the use of legacy platforms reduces the organization’s capability to drill down, organize or interact with metrics to gain a comprehensive view of data for in-depth analysis & prompt decision-making.
Learn how we partnered with a fortune 100 technology company to help them migrate a legacy reporting solution from crystal reports to SQL Server Reporting Services for one of their civic sector clients.
Project Overview
The North-America based tech company specialized in serving the civic services function of the government body. To streamline the reporting process for an existing legacy solution, they were looking for a dedicated Microsoft Services technology partner with experience in legacy application modernization. They were seeking an alternative solution to migrate Crystal Reports, which had become inefficient and expensive to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). With crystal reports being phased out, it was more important than ever for Epicor users to modernize & migrate to a centralized, reliable & customizable platform while ensuring the integrity of the static & dynamic reports. It would offer the organization the ability to drill down, organize or interact with metrics to gain a comprehensive view of data. This would enable them to perform in-depth analysis with ease & take prompt decisions.
Team Rishabh helped convert crystal reports to SSRS with the right tech stack to not only increase efficiency and communication but even maximize productivity and departmental collaboration from desk to field operations. All of this helped foster constituent engagement and reduce human errors.
Challenges
- Migration of undocumented reports
- Managing multi-level & drill-down functionality of reports
- Complex business logic for multi-level reports
- Poor report process performance
Solution
The modernization strategy was part of a larger platform standardization effort where the end client was shutting down Crystal Reports and was looking to migrate from crystal reports to SSRS.
Process basics:
1. Detailed understanding of client’s database and data structure.
2. Prioritizing reports-base on active & daily usage and by a large user group.
3. Exploring workarounds for the different capabilities of Crystal Reports and SSRS.
The crystal reports conversion to the SSRS project was broken into multiple sprints with our team performing below listed activities.
- Automated conversion using proprietary tools
- SSRS data source configuration
- Database (DB) analysis
- Based on the existing structure of reports, re-creation of datasets, and connecting them to the data sources in SQL Server Reporting Service
- Creation of dataset queries to fetch all required fields for the report in SSRS
- Creation of the layout of the report in SSRS
- Creation of formulas and custom functions
- Creation of metrics, charts, sub reports, and linked reports
- Reports deployment & user acceptance testing
Benefits
- 100% report process optimization & central reporting service
- 40% improvement in performance due to more control with reporting
- 75% reduction in manual work efforts
Customer Profile
A US-based Fortune 100 IT company
Technologies
- SQL Server 2017
- Crystal Reports
- SQL Server Reporting Service
- DACPAC
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