We use it almost exclusively for our analytics for the Epic environment. So, a lot of healthcare-related reporting and financial reporting is done on it. It is not geared towards the operational world. It is geared towards the analytical world where we're looking at a month of data, a year of data, or a quarter of data.
We try to use its current version.
On the first of the month, when we get ready to close the books, we run a lot of analytics through the BI platform. The analytics are available to our financial team within 10 hours, and we typically run around 21,000 jobs at the beginning of every month. We schedule them, and they get downloaded as CSVs and then people consume them.
I like the fact that we can integrate it seamlessly within our Epic environment, but probably the best thing that Crystal Reports offers is the ability to do visualizations. They're simple to do, and they're catchy. So, it is a really great tool.
It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently.
It is a really solid product. It has been out there for some time, and it gives you exactly what you need.
We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products.
They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense.
I have been probably using it for close to eight years.
It has been a solid product. We have had no issues. Any issues that we had were self-inflicted. They were not consequences of the product.
We run around 21,000 reports at the beginning of every month, and we get them done in 10 hours. These are not operational reports. These are analytics reports. Some of those reports pull a year's worth of data, aggregate that data, and then spit it out with visualizations and everything else. So, it operates efficiently.
We're a healthcare system in Dallas, Texas. We have 11 hospitals. A vast majority of the leaders, probably more than 2,000 leaders, use the results of the products we create from Crystal Reports, etc. A significant amount of the other staff also uses the results. Our finance team uses it almost exclusively to generate their data. We have probably more than 18,000 people working through our facilities, and probably half of them in some fashion or another touch the SAP environment at some point during the course of a month. So, it is being used extensively. We rely on this product.
We don't call SAP directly. We work through Epic. Our licensing with SAP is through Epic. So, Epic has a direct relationship with SAP, not us.
I have used other products, but my company hasn't really used any other product or any big data solution like this.
It is pretty straightforward. We had no complications at all in installing it. We had some complications getting it to work with Epic, but once it was set up, it has been sitting there and doing its thing. We don't ever have to mess with it. It has been a solid product. It just works.
For its implementation, we used a consultant, but he was not associated with SAP. We took the help of a gentleman who was DBA experienced in implementing this product in an Epic environment, but he was not an SAP employee.
For its maintenance, I have one staff member who's the admin of SAP. She has additional duties with the maintenance of this product, which probably takes up 10% of her time.
We purchase licenses through Epic. So, we get an Epic price as opposed to the SAP price. If we were going to use other products like Webi that they offer or exclusively use BI Launch Pad, it would cost a lot because half of our employees would touch it in some fashion. So, we use Epic-Crystal integration to keep the licensing cost down. I believe the BI Launch Pad licensing is something like $800 for each, and the Crystal Report licensing is something like $500 for each, but that's not what we pay.
I would advise others to get somebody who knows what they're doing when they install it. That's what we did. It is a complex product, and trying to fumble through all the bits and pieces and the nuances of it is challenging.
It has been around for years. It has been there ever since I went to software engineering. It does what it does. It is built to do that every year. It just needs to get more efficient at doing it. It just needs better integration with third parties and maybe a price reduction for the licensing.
I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.
