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When stand-alone reporting tools first began to emerge in the early 1990’s, their purpose was to provide business users with direct access to information so that they could avoid the long wait that IT required. Many thought that business users when armed with these tools will make better decisions, have time to be more creative planners and of course become much more effective in every other way.

Having trained over 8,000 people in enterprise reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools over the past 8 years, we have discovered that these so-called end-user BI tools like Crystal Reports did not fulfill most expectations. In reality, they were overwhelming for most users. The tools were often too time-consuming to learn and the underlying Lawson and other database structures much too complex. Since using these tools was not a full-time job for most users, they would forget how to use them each time they sat down to work with them. Without an organized report management environment, they could not locate existing reports and often created duplicates. Without a complete understanding of database structures and SQL, reports ran slowly, were not maintainable and were often inaccurate.

Still hoping that business users would find a way to master these tools, organizations began to deploy them in an unmanaged fashion. Individual departments purchased their own BI tools, developed their own business views and defined their own key metrics. Without strong central controls, many organizations found themselves in possession of different views and data warehouses that contained overlapping information. They were not able to deliver a consistent and unified view of information.

Our experience indicates that many organizations are moving BI from a departmental solution to an enterprise one. Ultimately, an enterprise BI solution needs to address the needs of the entire organization across various functional areas and user segments. At some point, the CEO will ask for an integrated view of the entire organization. The BI solution needs to be able to fulfill this request.

As organizations move from silos to the enterprise, they start establishing standards for their BI tools. They begin to know their users needs, strengths and limitations. What information do they really need? How can they best receive it? Do they really need to design the reports or can they simply view a result with some ability to interact with it? Sometimes users really need to see a significant amount of information and have the ability to explore that data. Other times they simply need to review summary data on a weekly or monthly basis. In deploying BI to the enterprise, organizations must select BI tools that can be dynamically customized to users' requirements. The tools must also support a zero-client environment and provide adequate scalability to meet enterprise processing requirements.
 

You can switch between product lines without having to go into Preferences/User Options in Lawson Portal.  Type in lawform in the search box in Lawson portal and it will bring up a screen that will allow you to switch your token and product line without changing your user options:

This is helpful for ProcessFlow administrators who need to constantly switch between PROD and LOGAN to update and review the WF screens in the LOGAN product line. It’s also helpful for maintaining the RD30 records for users in your company. Once you're done with the form in LOGAN or another product line in use, just use the search box to transfer to a screen within the PROD product line without having to use lawform again.