We have purchased Lawson Enterprise Reporting and basically found out that its not a reporting tool at all.
What do you guys use for reporting? Please list all tools. All we have in house are:

1) Crystal
2) Lawson Canned Reports
3) Addins (very limited)

All these tools (with the exception of the Addins) require database knowledge and familiarity with the Lawson Tabel structure which is not documented anywhere.

We have Cognos Impromptu as our main reporting tool from Lawson and with our other databases. It is maintained by an in-house cognos team.

We just recently purchased Excel Add-Ins and have been utilizing it more and more as a reporting tool. They are nice because as a user we have access to pull the information ourself and do not need to have the database set-up knowledge. They are bit limited if Lawson has not pre-defined the relationship between two tables that house the information you need. Sometimes I need to run two separate reports to create the final data I need.

We use all of the following:

1) Crystal - this is our primary reporting tool with reports being published on Crystal Enterprise and accessed via our intranet by end users. This is by far the easiest and most flexible way I've seen to get at the data in Lawson. However, you will find the need to use stored procedures and views in some instances. Crystal is easy enough for most people to use but the key is understanding the Lawson tables and relationships. As a result, only your power users and programers will be able to use Crystal for anything other than basic reporting. Our Org trained alot of end users and found that unless they use Crystal frequently then they will basically be unable to use it at all because they don't understand the data setup in Lawson. Not the tool for the causal end user.

2) Lawson Canned Reports - some are fine, others not so useful. We use them in a limited capacity. I'd rather take the extra time to get exactly what I want using Crystal.

3) Addins - this is a great tool and we use it extensively but mainly for loading data. Crystal is much easier to use for reporting, although the addins may be useful if you want to pull an entire table into excel with no or limited formatting for instance. I wouldn't recommend addins as the primary method for reporting.

4) Access - we have several users that are more comfortable using Access than Crystal. They mainly use this for data validation and audit purposes since they can create their own tables within Access based on Lawson tables.

We exclusively use Crystal Reports and Crystal Enterprise to distribute our reports. I wish we had the Lawson Reporting Suite so we wouldn't have to wouldn't have to rely so heavily on understanding the database structure. But here are some tips and tricks to understanding the Lawson database.

You can find a good database diagram on www.LawsonGuru.com to help visually see the relationships between the various Lawson tables. Also, between these two Lawson utilities you should be able to get to everything you need regarding what tables a form uses and what fields and relationships are in that table:

Seeing what database tables a form uses:
1) Open Lawson
2) Form transfer (F8) to LAENV
3) Select User Desktop --> Application Text --> Print Technical Text
4) Type in the System Code (HR,PR,MM,GL,etc)
5) Type in the form name (HR11, PR140, PA26, etc)
6) A description of the form will be displayed along with all of the tables that the form references and updates

Seeing what fields, indexes, and relationships are in that table:
1) Open Lawson
2) Form Transfer (F8) to DBDOC
3) Type in the System Code (HR,PR,MM,GL,etc)
4) Type in the database table name (which you got by using the above instructions)
5) A description of the table will be displyaed along with indexes and relationship information at the bottom (use Cntr + Down Arrow to skip to the bottom)

We abandoned the Lawson report writer for HR because it can't handle employees in multiple positions correctly. I wish we had Lawson Reporting Suite but we don't because of the cost, so we use Crystal Reports tied directly to the database.

We use all of the routes mentioned above; personally, I prefer Access to Crystal - but it's a personal preference, not really a functional limitation or anything.

Also, you can use the "dbdoc" command in lawson to print up a list of all the tables and forms in a particular module, and their relationship to each other. These are massive reports that won't be particularly useful to many end-users (the GL dbdoc is nearly 500 pages), but I just wanted to mention that they are present.

[FONT=Geneva] We use Crystal and Access with the Oracle ODBC drivers.
We are not using the Lawson Crystal just the Enterprise Product. Very few report writer reports.

Our end-users mainly use Crystal for reporting. We also use Crystal Enterprise by having our power-users create the reports and then we distribute them out to users who don't own a copy of Crystal. We also use Add-Ins, mainly for uploading data. I like to use Toad (Quest Software) for reporting. It requires knowledge of the SQL language, but it's very easy to use and it allows you to view the database schema which is nice because you to see the indexes, field names/sizes, along with other information about the database structure itself in a nice GUI format vs Lawson's text format. I am not a DBA, so I don't have the capability to change the data or structure, just pull data out. I would only recommend Toad to technical staff and not Lawson end-users.

We have bought Lawson Reporting Suite but have not implemented it yet. That will happen sometime this year. If anyone has already implemented it, I'd be interested in hearing what you think about it. What advantages did you find it in?

www.LawsonGuru.com has visual representations of the database structure on their web site, which is also very helpful.

Just my .02, but even with LRS, there is need for in depth understanding of the database structure for reporting. OLE DB is not a good solution for reporting due to the performance limitations and the fact that it limits you to the relationships that Lawson has defined.

Is anybody implementing (or considering implementing) LBI 9.0? Specifically interested in any experience implementing the data filtering/bursting functionality of the application, but any thoughts on your experience with it is appreciated.

We use many of the solutions listed above. We use two other solutions not mentioned yet:

-) ReportSmith, included as part of ADP/PC Payroll. We use it to hit the Lawson tables. Very useful, within its limits. We have replaced a number of ReportSmith reports with Crystal Reports reports recently.

-) Custom Access reporting, based on custom RngDbDump outputs. That can get very powerful and very complex, since Access can "slice and dice" information in ways that Lawson is not set up to do by default. This requires a lot of programming work; its advantage is that it does not make any changes to Lawson itself.

:D We have crystal and canned reports as well as add-ins. I like crystal because it can be integrated with the dashboards.