Available reporting options

Standard Reports

Standard reports are the reports delivered when Infor Human Capital Management is installed. Most of them can be categorized into several types of standard reports:

• Listings of data, such as Supervisor Listing (HR207), which lists all supervisor codes defined on Supervisor (HR07.1)

• Update reports that are capable of updating data in the database, such as Action Update (PA100), which processes pending personnel actions to update employee information

• Purge reports, such as Benefit Purge (BN430), which purges current and/or historical employee benefit records

• Conversion reports, such as Employee (HR511), which loads employee records into Infor based on data from a non-Infor application

• Year end reports, such as Payroll Year End Close (PR999), which resets key payroll-related variables for the coming year

For more information on adding and submitting standard reports, refer to Getting Started with the Desktop Client or Getting Started with e-Console, depending on your choice of presentation layer.

After you examine the delivered standard reports (for data output, format of the output, parameters available to dictate the output, and so on), you may find that you want to write custom reports for specific needs. Additional tools are available for this purpose. Each of these tools vary in features, functionality, and intended audience (ranging from users with little or no technical knowledge to programmers who might be unfamiliar with the relevant business processes); one tool might not satisfy all reporting needs.

HR Writer

HR Writer is a product delivered as part of the HR application. Using several forms, you can create reports on employee data. You can use HR Writer to compile information that is not included on a standard report or is not presented in the format you need. HR Writer does not require any special technical knowledge or skills but does require knowledge of Infor Human Capital Management and its data items. The next three chapters of this User Guide are devoted to using HR Writer.

Reports Designer

Reports Designer is a product in the Open Component Extension for JavaScript® toolkit. It is a web-based product for querying Infor application data. The presentation vehicle is a Web browser, which provides a user-friendly interface. The Reports Designer does not require a high degree of technical skill, although an understanding of which data items are stored in which data files is helpful for mastering this tool. Users are able to include Drill Around features in the reports, export report data, e-mail output to others, and add presentation features like graphics, colors, fonts, and so on. It is also simple to publish these reports in The Information Office® for easy web access.

4GL

As a piece of the Advanced Development Workbench, 4GL is another cross-application tool for designing custom reports, although it is suited to the more technical user. It requires some knowledge of the Lawson database file structure, including files and fields in which the data is stored and the indexes and conditions by which it is retrieved. Composing reports with this tool requires some programming background and knowledge of Lawson's proprietary COBOL-like code. Once created, a 4GL report has its own server form and can be accessed by Lawson users just as they would access (and process) a standard report form.

Third Party Tools

Several 3rd party reporting products are available to report on data stored in Lawson's database. These reporting tools usually require special middleware (such as an ODBC driver in some cases) to be resident on each client PC.