ViaData has unveiled its Catalyst Report Writer, part of the Catalyst Business Systems Engine Suite, for producing business reports. The company says preparing a clear, informative report is one of the toughest assignments business professionals face.
“Earlier we designed Catalyst, and now Catalyst Report Writer, to allow any relatively skilled manager or business analyst to do most of the work themselves,” explains Craig Byren, MD of ViaData.
He says much like Catalyst reduces the time and cost to develop database-driven business applications, Catalyst Report Writer simplifies the creation of reports for business.
Catalyst enables reports to be designed in Microsoft Word and then, through a simple linking process by IT staff, turned into dynamic documents using Catalyst Report Writer, the company says. “The reports are rendered as HTML documents that can be viewed with MS Word, a Web browser or the Catalyst HTML viewer.
“Most business professionals are very comfortable working in Word,” Byren points out. “By linking with Word, Catalyst allows them to design the report as they like it, instead of spending 90% of their time fiddling with layouts and positioning graphics,” he adds.
Byren says Now Catalyst and Catalyst Report Writer give individuals the freedom to decide on what information they want and how it should be presented. “The IT professionals can then focus purely on ensuring that the underlying data links are done correctly,” he adds.
The result is that the whole process takes a fraction of the time it used to, and each professional in the process only has to do what they need to do, Byren says.
Break with tradition
data structures, and mastery of a number of very technical concepts.”
According to Byren, this meant creating reports or other documents using data extracted from business systems had to be left in the hands of technical programmers, who also had to take on responsibility for the report layouts.
“At each step they needed to go back and get approval from the managers for whom the reports were being created,” Byren explains. This process of write-review-rewrite was time-consuming and expensive, and tied up valuable skills in a task that was frequently tedious, he says.
This also made it difficult to innovate, states Byren. “Organisations could not experiment with new or better formats without going through an onerous process.” The Catalyst engine leverages the power of industry-standard SQL database environments to reduce project times from months or years to just days or weeks, he points out.
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