Companies are collecting oceans of data, and struggle with transforming it into usable information. Most businesses focus on two methods of sharing data - the report and the dashboard. While these two terms mean many things to many people, it is important to understand what these terms mean and how the report and dashboard have similar features but they are not the same thing.  

What is a Report?

A report is meant to be used to gather detailed intelligence on the operations within an organization, thus a report can be either very broadly covering a wide scope of related information, or narrowly focusing on details of a single item, purpose, or event. All of this information, while presented in a report, is meant to be a snapshot in time.

Quite often, a report is built within the ERP system itself and often is constrained by the graphical and user limitations within the ERP. More often than not, large amounts of data are exported to Excel where added features allow for better manipulation of the data to a format that is digestible by users. Regardless, the data is only valid for that moment and time.

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a graphical interface that provides at-a-glance views revolving around answering a central question. For example, an executive may ask you for up-to-the-minute details on "how the business is doing?". The answer to that question is as complex as the organizational structure of the company, but it is probably very simply measured with approximately 10 metrics. Those 10 metrics can likely be analyzed in chart form, and can and should be combined into one chart when the numbers are relatable or are on a similar scale. All these things should be considered when building a dashboard.

Dashboards, similar to the one in your vehicle, display critical data. Imagine driving down the road and having to push a bunch of buttons to find out how much fuel you have left, or having to pull over and pop the hood to check the oil pressure. It would be dangerous and a waste of your precious time. Your car's control panel or dashboard displays the most crucial information in an easy-to-use, graphical way.

How do Reports and Dashboards differ?

PowerLink is a Windows-based client for end-users within the Infor Development Framework (IDF). PowerLink allows exports/imports from/to the ERP database, but how much do you really know about it? Here is some helpful information about PowerLink.​

Why does PowerLink sometimes fail to export all records?...

You can use job management to schedule jobs based on your organizational requirements. For example, you can schedule jobs at non-peak hours to improve the overall system performance in a heavily loaded environment. A job consists of one or more sessions or shell commands, or both, that run without user interaction. The sessions and shell commands in a job can be started while you are not logged on to the ERP system. You can schedule jobs to start processes periodically, at a defined interval, or immediately. Typically, you use job management for print and processing sessions.

Job data  - To create a job, you must specify basic job data and link sessions or shell commands, or both, to the job. In the basic job data, you specify whether the job is periodical. For periodical jobs, you specify how the job will be scheduled.

Shared job data tables  - Typically, each company stores its own basic job data. As a result, a job runs for a particular company. However, in a job, you can also run sessions in more than one company. You can run sessions in multiple companies when the job data tables of the associated companies are physically mapped to a single main company.

Job execution - Jobs can be started in multiple ways. The job’s status defines how you can start the job. You can start the job if the job’s status is In Queue or Free.

Job history -  When the execution of a job stops, for example, when the job completes successfully or when a runtime error occurs, information is written to a history log. The job history contains information, such as the date and time of the execution and the reasons why the job and its associated session ended.

Sales quotations are used to supply a sold-to business partner with the required details to make a purchasing decision.

You can create a sales quotation in response to a request for quotation (RFQ) from a business partner, or as a sales tool to initiate the sales process with potential business partners. A quotation includes the dates, terms, items, or item descriptions to be sold, and a success percentage, which reflects the level of certainty that the quotation will be accepted. Sales quotations are included in the planning modules based on their success percentages. Quotations with a high success percentage are considered as sold.

You can print and send quotations to business partners. You can specify the results of the returned quotations in Sales. If the quotation is not accepted, you can...

Infor LX provides a tightly integrated drop shipment processing capability. The product supports the creation, tracking, and management of customer drop shipment orders via the Order Management, Purchasing, and Billing applications.

The order processing professional initiates drop shipments during customer order creation. You can designate any order line for drop shipment if it meets user-defined drop-ship controls. If you designate a line as a drop-ship line, the system automatically creates a drop-ship request in purchase order processing.

When a buyer responds to a drop-ship request and creates a purchase order, Infor LX

An ACR system parameter allows you to specify whether to measure invoice age from the date on which you create the invoice, invoice date, or the date on which the invoice is due. You can set up a separate terms code for each customer on the system to set the basic terms of payment for that customer. For example, this term could specify the number of days an invoice can be due before it is considered past due and the number of days that a discount is available. The system uses the terms code data to...

In the Financial Statements module, you can:

• Define financial statements, and link a structure of child statement accounts and parent statement accounts to these financial statements.
• Link ledger accounts and/or dimensions to the statement accounts.
• Link cash flow reasons to cash flow statement accounts.
• Export financial data to FST reporting tables.
• Print reports directly, or use the BIRT report functionality to print to PDF, HTML, and export to Excel or Word.

Data drill down in financial statements - You can...

The planning data for the method of manufacturing is defined in Routing. A routing consists of operations, with each operation identifying the last to be carried out in a work center and/or on a certain machine defined for a specific site.

Routings can be as follows:

• Standard Routing - A generic routing that can be attached to multiple items
• Item specific - A routing that is applied to one item
• Network routing - A routing containing sequentially ordered operations and parallel operations
• Order quantity dependent routing - A routing that is defined for a specific quantity of items

You use the Routing module to record routings for manufactured items. You can define the following: