If you’re looking for a tool to help create custom reports and manage your organization’s reporting needs, Workday BIRT has you covered!
BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) are most commonly used to design and run various reports across multiple different systems and solutions. The BIRT system consists of two main components: the report designer tool and the runtime engine. Both of which aid in producing, maintaining, and optimizing reports across the BIRT system.
Read on to learn more about how Workday BIRT can benefit your organization and where our senior-level Workday consultants can come in to help!
What Is Workday BIRT?
Workday BIRT is a business intelligence tool derived from Eclipse. Eclipse is a foundation that provides their community with a business-friendly environment for software collaboration and innovations. It functions as a drag-and-drop report designer that allows users to leverage business form layouts to meet their organization’s needs.
Workday BIRT improves process efficiency and employee productivity by helping users manage analytics and reports with real-time results and insights. The main objective of Workday BIRT is to connect reports from Workday to the Workday BIRT reporting tool to create business form layouts in a more effective manner.
Workday BIRT allows users to quickly create BIRT reports from different data sources, like spreadsheets and web services, and build interactive dashboards and visualizations to simplify data management and interpretation processes.
Why is Workday BIRT Important?
Workday BIRT leverages information reporting properties, visualizations, and charts fixed in customer applications and web-based applications to improve reporting and data analysis functions across teams. The Workday BIRT tool can also be used to facilitate smarter decision-making, improve data analysis, and track constant changes across older data sources.
Overview of Workday BIRT
When you get started with Workday BIRT, you’ll see there are some different features to explore and leverage across your data analysis and reporting strategy.
Here’s an overview of what you may find in the program:
Report Designer
The report designer in Workday BIRT provides an intuitive and illustrative interface for users.
You’re able to define and describe variables like queries, data sources, datasets, report layout for data fields, and other attributes to download the SQL server information tools.
The report designer consists of four components:
- Information component
- Standard component
- Checkbox component
- Advanced component
Designing a Custom Report
The Workday report designer is a vigorous tool that can control and filter information.
In Workday BIRT, the custom Workday report writer curates advanced reports that meet all the criteria a custom report needs. From measured fields to filters, map designs, and more, Workday BIRT makes it easy to create, manage, and optimize custom reporting functions across the entire organization, regardless of the technical experience of each team member.
Here are three types of custom reports:
- Flat table: A sortable data table
- Map overlay: Indicates traffic, engagements, etc.
- Explorer: Includes line graphs and data tables
Formatting Properties
Formatting a report properly is one of the most crucial aspects of the reporting process.
The Workday BIRT report designer provides many choices to change the look of a report design, including both visual and functional design formats and specifications.
When utilizing the different formatting options, you’ll be able to change and update font styles, colors, sizes, alignments, and other report elements. You can also add colors to the background of your report and add a border to make it more aesthetic, while still maintaining exact report layout specifications.
Building Delivered Design Reports
Workday delivers all of the business form layouts you need.
Workday offers BIRT design reports to help users curate, download, modify, and apply the custom report design to the right reports. The occupant for the delivered business form layout is used to demonstrate the report design in the report solution and deliver more efficient reporting functions to users across the organization.
Aggregates, Sorting, Grouping
A key step in report building is aggregating, sorting, and grouping of data.
Grouping information can make it easier to add an information summary at any time, not just at the end or beginning of each group. Showing the aggregates of each data source also provides greater visibility into data groupings at any level.
Data Sets and Business Objects
Workday BIRT consists of multiple business objects, including both secondary and primary objects.
This also means there’s a data set for each topic in the created object. When there are multiple data sets, a new column can be added to the object table in the BIRT system for greater visibility and accessibility to important objects included in each column.
Expressions in BIRT
Workday BIRT can provide report design developers with tools that help them create custom codes to withstand complex report creation processes and deliver reports more efficiently across the organization.
Workday BIRT Training
Here’s a high-level overview of Workday BIRT Training for Workday reporting developer, designer, and business form layouts:
Topics Included in Workday BIRT Training:
- Aggregates, sorting, and grouping
- Creation of delivered and custom report designs
- Settled expressions
- Data sets and business objects
- Workday Studio mapping and interpretation
- Data sources and projects
- Report formatting
Types of Workday Training for the BIRT Tool:
- Instructor led-live training: Involves utilizing a trainer to guide you through Workday BIRT training.
- Self-paced learning: Provides users with all resources they need to learn at their own pace, including videos, PDFs, and blogs
Setting Up Workday BIRT
So you’re ready to start setting up your Workday BIRT program, what’s next?
Installation of Software:
To start utilizing Workday BIRT, you must install the software needed and configure the system and the data sources you plan to use. You may need to install extra components depending on the type of reports you’ll be creating. If you’re unsure of which configurations you need or you don’t have the right configuration support, our consultants can help guide you through which options are the best fit for you!
Designing Reports:
After you’ve set up your Workday BIRT environment, you can start designing reports. And, once you’ve chosen a data source to use, you can use the report designer tool to create the report, format it, and configure its layout to meet your unique reporting needs.
Integration:
Workday BIRT can be integrated with other Workday applications for seamless data transfers. You can also use APIs to connect BIRT to other systems to access even more data sources and improve visibility across the entire enterprise.
Best Practices When Working With Workday BIRT
To get the most out of your Workday BIRT investment, you should consider these best practices:
- Regularly backup your system
- Test your reports before deploying them
- Maintain your software to ensure peak functionality
- Track any changes made to your system to maintain accurate reports
Benefits Of Workday BIRT
Here are some of the most important advantages of using Workday BIRT:
- Holds all composite and medium reports, allowing the user to leverage drag-and-drop tools to pivot quickly.
- Provides flexible functionality to access the report designer’s user interface without the need for any custom coding.
- Offers options and wizards to generate interactive, appealing, and easy-to-use diagrams.
- Leverages BIRT features from shared sources, like reports, templates, styles, scripts, and queries, to create and manage different reports.
How We Can Help
Whether you’re looking into implementing a single module or an entire set of Workday applications, Surety Systems is here to help you. Our Workday team is committed to helping your organization create, manage, and optimize integrations between your Workday applications and external tools or systems.
Our team of senior-level Workday consultants has the skills and experience needed to help implement Workday for the first time, facilitate integrations within Workday BIRT, navigate complex report creation or delivery needs, and anything else in between.
Contact Us
If you’re ready to implement Workday BIRT or you’re interested in learning where ourWorkday consultants help, contact us today!
