> New! Visit the V8 Microsite. A one-stop resource about the V8.  Includes product details, screenshots and more >>>

What is Reportive?

Reportive is an Adaptive Reporting Platform that gives business analysts the ability to manage the end-to-end process through a single, integrated tool. Because Reportive is designed with the needs of the business analyst in mind, it allows the organization to adapt more quickly to changes in the business than traditional BI solutions.

Like a Swiss army knife, Reportive tightly integrates all the functions needed to create, individually customize and distribute reports to many users into a single, easy-to-use software tool.

How is Reportive different?

Most business intelligence (BI) platforms require separate, specialized tools to manage tasks like data integration, data cleansing, analytical function design, dashboard creation, and distribution of individually customized reports. In contrast, Reportive integrates all the capabilities needed to create and manage business reports into a single platform.

Because Reportive is designed as a general-purpose tool for business analysts, a single business user can prototype new analytics and dashboards in days and create complete report booklets in weeks. In contrast, highly specialized BI tools often require months of time and teams of data and IT experts to create and adapt business reports.

The Reportive Visual Workflow interface is ideal for creating "storyboards" where specific reporting tasks are recorded and played back once validated. Whether creating individually-customized sales reports for multiple regions, sophisticated analytical simulations for brand managers, or "one-page" dashboards for C-Level executives, Reportive Process Elements are simply dragged and dropped to form the individual steps of the "storyboard".

Why use Reportive

Reportive is particularly powerful for business reporting applications which need to be adapted and delivered quickly:

• Rapid report prototyping: because the integrated Reportive platform contains all the features required to prototype a report, a business analyst can quickly create new reports with real or sample data. Many other reporting tools are too specialized for any one individual to create, test and produce a new reporting process quickly.
• Pixel-perfect report rendering: all Reportive reports are rendered to native Microsoft Office formats, including pixel-perfect PowerPoint, PDF or HTML. Many other reporting tools use proprietary rendering engines and either do not support formats like PowerPoint or support them only in low-resolution mode.
• Visual Workflow: Allow business analysts to be responsible for the end-to-end reporting process that supports their unique business needs, by simply assembling "Lego-blocks" and creating their own "storyboards". Freed in large part from the lengthy delays required to produce new reports or adapt existing reports to business changes through a centralized IT organization, business users can concentrate on analyzing the information and making the appropriate business decisions in a timely matter.
• Reduce burden on IT: Reportive can greatly reduce the IT expertise required to create and modify reports, particularly for reports whose KPIs, data or distribution parameters change frequently.
• Rapid reporting for Excel data sources: 70% of the decisions made by corporations are based on information contained in Excel spreadsheets. Reportive has patented abilities to automatically understand Excel spreadsheet formats to simplify data access and extraction. Other reporting tools are optimized for SQL queries sources and have difficulty handling complex Excel spreadsheets formats.
• Support Pharmaceutical and Automotive file formats: Reportive has particularly strong support for complex, industry specific data formats such as IMS, GERS and AAA. Other tools are optimized to retrieve information for relational or OLAP data sources and have difficulty handling complex flat-file or other non-standard data formats.

How to use Reportive

All functionality of Reportive is managed from the Project Manager, which uses a visual interface to display all the steps in the reporting process. There are four steps to creating a new report with Reportive. From the Project Manager, you drag and drop graphic elements representing each step of the reporting process.

1. Connect data: a set of connection wizards can connect to corporate data (this often requires help from corporate IT), departmental data (often in Excel), industry data (such as purchased flat file data). There are separate connection wizards for SQL data, Excel spreadsheets, and other common data sources.
2. Design report: the chart designer wizard can define KPIs, and design dashboards.
3. Send report: the delivery wizard controls all aspects of customizing reports and sending them to end users in a variety of formats, including PPT, XLS, DOC and HTML.
4. Get response: the report collection wizard can be used to aggregate quantitative responses or qualitative comments from end user report recipients for each element of a report, aggregate responses. This can be used to correct data errors, update data values and even automatically update underlying data sources.

Reportive can greatly reduce the burden on the IT department to prototype, create and modify reports. However, IT support is invaluable for gaining access to central data sources and for designing complex KPIs.

Although Reportive is much easier to use that traditional highly-specialized business intelligence tools, it still requires proper training and project management. Particularly for larger projects, successful deployment requires careful planning.

Reportive professional services staff or 3rd party consulting partners can manage each step of the reporting cycle: setting project requirements, working with business analysts and IT to connect data, defining KPIs, designing reports, rendering reports, setting up individual customization and distribution of reports, defining active feedback process for responses if desired.

Who Uses Reportive: Customer Examples

Reportive is ideal for knowledge workers who need to produce reports quickly. It provides 80% of the power of the heavy-weight reporting platforms with 20% of the complexity.

In particular, the Reportive platform excels at producing individually customized reports and distributing them to large groups of people. A typical Reportive users is a business analysts within the sales or marketing departments of large pharmaceutical and automotive companies.

Reporting for Pharmaceutical Sales Teams - Schering-Plough

"With the Reportive platform, we shortened the response time to create a new dashboard for our district sales managers from 5 months down to 5 days, all while reducing the load on our central IT team." Gregory Cordano, Director, Sales Force Effectiveness, Schering-Plough.

Schering-Plough is a $9.5B pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey. Their European sales organization recently chose Reportive to enable business analysts within their sales organization to create and manage reports for improving sales effectiveness. The Schering Plough team evaluated a number of solutions, including investing in a "heavy-weight" set of business intelligence tools. However, the level of training and technical expertise required to make business analysts proficient across an entire suite of BI tools was considered prohibitive. Instead, Schering Plough selected the Reportive adaptive reporting platform. With Reportive, Schering Plough business analysts have a single, general purpose tool for managing the reporting process.

Reportive provides a tightly integrated reporting platform that is powerful enough to produce departmental reports, yet simple enough to be managed by business-users. With a simple drag and drop interface, business-users can create and distribute customized reports tailored to each individual's needs.