How to Review FRx in Preparation for Migration to Management Reporter
If you’ve decided to upgrade or migrate from FRx to Management Reporter, the first step is to review your existing FRx reports. Here’s how to review and pare down your FRx reports to make the migration easier:
- Make sure you’re reviewing only the reports that you will need in Management Reporter. This is a great time to clean house and organize because there are often unused reports. The fewer reports you migrate, the less work for everyone involved.
- If you’re on FRx SP10 or higher, the “open” dialog box will give you the ability to see when a report was last run and by whom. Just scroll to the right to see all this information, and you can sort it too. This is a can’t miss fantastic tool.
- List your existing reports—here’s how to get a list in Excel. You can use this list to make notes and document your thought processes, so you don’t later wonder “WHAT was I thinking!”
- If there are lots of reports to review, I’ll often review the FRx database in Access.
- Once you’ve got a pared down list, start by reviewing the reporting trees for just these reports. In column G, there will usually be ampersands (&) in the segment for the natural (main) account. (So if the natural account has 5 digits, there will be 5 ampersands.) Do you have ampersands in more than one account segment? Do you have ampersands in a segment other than the natural account? If either of these answers is yes, then you should identify which catalogs use these trees. These are reports with advanced designs. Are they important to migrate? Instead of migrating, you may want to recreate these to take advantage of Management Reporter’s dimension capabilities.
- Review your reporting trees: column P may contain email addresses for electronic distribution.
- Review your catalogs: on the Building Blocks tab, there will be a box to ‘Use row format(s) and worksheet links from reporting tree’. This is an advanced design and you should investigate whether this will work in Management Reporter. It might; it might not. Maybe it needs to be recreated instead of migrated.
- Review your catalogs for Effective Dates: also on the Building Blocks tab, are there any boxes checked for ‘Effective dates’? Often these are quarter to date reports that use multiple building blocks for whichever box is checked (most often columns). Any column that’s not associated with a catalog will not migrate, so you may have to create a new catalog for each to get them to come over.
- You should also take time to understand dimension value sets in Management Reporter so you can take advantage in order to reduce maintenance.
I guarantee there’s lots more to do, but this should get you a good pared down list of FRx reports that should be migrated to Management Reporter. Hope it saves some time and headache.
Cheers—Jan
Hi Jan,
I recently upgraded FRx 6.7 to MR 2012. One of the column definition used the following formula.
IF C=0 THEN 0 ELSE D/ABS(C)
MR doesn’t recognize ABS function. Do you have any idea if this is available in MR 2012, or is there a workaround?
Thanks
Amir
Hi Amir…I don’t think it’s there yet but you may be able to use a nested if/then in its place in the above formula. Hope that works. Jan
We are in the beginning stages of thinking about migrating to MR. One of the things that has held us back from making the move is Effective Dates. I understand what you are saying about about Effective Dates, but we have been told that MR does not use Effective Dates at all. That would mean having to add a LOT of catalogs. Is it true that you need a separate catalog for every report or is there some function in MR that works like Effective Dates?
ps…just found your website and I’m really sad that I didn’t find it about 10 years ago.
HA re 10 years ago…that’s about how long I’ve been blogging!~ Effective Dates: don’t get me started. I’ve been telling Microsoft they need effective dates since I first saw it left off the feature list in 2007. At that time, Microsoft said that in 2009, Sierra (what would become MR) “will have the functionality of FRx 6.7 today”. Not! I’ve discussed the need for effective dates (and Subtotals) live and in person every year at Convergence since then (except this year when I purposefully didn’t go), but they do not understand the importance. Their solution is to create multiple catalogs and put all the quarterly reports in a report group so you can run them all at one time. Sigh.
Two more things, then off the soapbox. One, if you can slide by with Quarter End reports instead of Quarter to Date reports, then you can simplify by using “Base-2:Base” and end up with just 1 report definition. Two, you shouldn’t have to slide by. Maybe think about making the move to a competing product. Food for thought. Thanks Mary, and good luck. Jan
Hi,
Migration of FRx6.7 SP12 to Management Reporter 2012.
Server – Single Server machine
FRx version – 6.7 SP12
Sample Companies- removed
FRx Database – No MS Access
The FRx instance has got 13 companies with 12 Specification sets.
11 companies are mapped to identical specification sets. Rest of the 2 companies
are mapped to a single specification set. In the company information tab, the GP
company is different in both the companies which has identical specification sets.
Here, I would like to clarify few things,
1. The companies with identical spefication sets will undergo any changes while on migration
2. Whether we can migrate more than 100 databases in one go by using “Compact FRx Database”
3. Is it possible to migrate individual companies though they all reside in single instance. If yes,
what are the steps to follow.
Hi Vinitha…sounds like your best bet would be to discuss with tech support or a consultant. Best of luck to you…Jan