“I use XL Reporter all the time. It's easy to create reports and it's great that I can incorporate Excel functions into my report templates. All of our reports generate as fully formatted Excel files, which makes report distribution very easy.

XL Reporter is a critical tool for our company to effectively run our business.”

Customer Profile

For more than 50 years, Danner Manufacturing, Inc. (“Danner”) has been manufacturing pumps, filters, pond accessories, lighting and other accessories for Water Gardening, Aquarium, Pool/Spa, OEM and Hydroponic industries throughout North America. The brand names they manufacture and market for are: PondMaster, ProLine, Supreme, Magnetic-Drive, Hampton Water Gardens, Cover-Care, Skilter, AquaMaster, Ovation, MainStream and BioMatrix.

They are trademarked by their commitment to high quality and reasonably priced products, thus creating the best value for their customers.

Business Situation

Danner had been using Dynamics GP for 6 of years and utilized a variety of tools for reporting. Their primary reporting tool for reporting on sub-ledgers was Crystal Reports. Crystal Reports was a more technical tool that required knowledge of the Dynamics GP tables in the Microsoft SQL database. They were looking for a more user-friendly report writer that would allow them to easily create their necessary reports. For example, each month they spent a considerable amount of time manually putting together a ‘Manufacturing by Order' report which is critical to helping them run their business. This is a report that offered them a global overview of their manufacturing process by reporting across multiple tables out of Dynamics GP, including: Sales Order Processing, Inventory, Manufacturing and Purchase Order.

Solutions

Then Danner came across XL Reporter, which is an Excel-based report writer and ad-hoc query tool all-in-one. It offered an environment (Excel) that the employees writing reports were familiar with, but more importantly, it allowed them to automate the creation of their ‘business critical' cross-module reports.

After implementing XL Reporter, their manufacturing reports could be generated “live” whenever they needed them. They could also be scheduled to automatically generate and distribute (using the built-in scheduler) as part of a reporting package (Excel workbook), which could include financial as well as operational reports.