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How to Add Advanced Scheduling Features to Business Intelligence (BI) Documents

Scheduling & Distribution is one of the most important features that businesses look for in a BI tool. It helps IT admins, business users, and end-users to avoid repeating the same manual steps for exporting and distributing documents.

Wyn Enterprise's Scheduling module is a powerful tool in the hands of business users and IT admins that makes BI document distribution an easy and efficient process. Thereby, saving a lot of time, effort, and resources for other critical jobs.

You can follow the guide to BI document scheduling & distribution to learn about the fundamentals of scheduling in Wyn Enterprise. In this blog, we’ll guide you through several advanced scheduling configurations that Wyn Enterprise offers, including

Schedule Templates

A schedule template is a pre-configured document consisting of recurrence details, recipient information, delivery channel, and other settings. You can choose to use a schedule template in situations such as,

  • share documents with the same settings, frequently and over time
  • use company-regulated distribution settings
  • simplify the task creation for end users by using preselected configurations

Wyn Enterprise offers built-in templates for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly task executions and allows admins to create custom templates based on your business needs. You can create schedule templates from the Scheduling tab on the Configuration page of the Admin Portal as shown below:

Scheduling tab on the Configuration page

Because of its nature and purpose of reusability, a schedule template is available with the “Scheduled” execution mode only. It may be possible that not all schedule settings are supposed to be preset in a template. For example, take the Export format. You want to let your end users choose it themselves. Such settings can be configured on the portal as shown below:

A schedule template is available with the “Scheduled” execution mode

Document Binding

Often in businesses, there are situations that requires multiple documents to be shared together with the stakeholders. These situations may include a summary dashboard and the research/detailed report in a consulting enterprise, medical information such as blood test reports, electronic case reports, physical examination reports compiled into one file for a patient, several loan documents zipped together, and many more scenarios.

To cater to these business use cases, Wyn Enterprise offers a way to attach multiple documents to a single Scheduled task and distribute them together as a compressed archive. Thus, saving time by avoiding multiple emails. You can easily batch an export of documents and make the scheduled deliveries more efficient and productive.

When you add a Schedule Task to a document, you can attach one or more documents, dashboards, or reports to it at the Export settings step in the Add Task dialog. It provides separate export and parameter settings for each document as shown below:

Provide separate export and parameter settings for each document

Follow the user guide to learn more about setting up a document binder in Wyn Enterprise.

Report Bursting

Report bursting is a process where the same report is shared or distributed to multiple users. However, the recipients receive only a subset of the report with data/results related only to them, subject to certain security rules. For example, Billing Statements, Policy Certificates, Letters, Pre-filled Forms, Credit Statements, and many more.

It is beneficial for IT teams looking to distribute periodic reports to a dynamic distribution list with data security implemented at the report level in the form of filters or parameters. It can greatly reduce administrative burden because one report (and one scheduled task) is required to cater to the distribution needs of multiple users.

Configure Report Bursting in Wyn Enterprise

In Wyn Enterprise you can choose to enable Report bursting with a Scheduled task. When you select this option, you see a tab enabled to define the bursting dataset as shown below:

Choose to enable Report bursting with a Scheduled task

The data values from this dataset are used to burst or split the report into multiple copies for selected recipients. Wyn Enterprise offers two options to choose the data for bursting reports:

  1. From a dataset existing on the Wyn Server.
  2. Using a custom dataset where fields and data records are added manually.

The former is recommended in situations of large, frequently updated, and dynamic data such as customer emails, invoice id, etc. while the latter can be used with limited, predetermined, and static data such as sales months, product categories, and departments.

Once the dataset is configured, you can use the fields with parameters or delivery settings such as Email, Subject, and Body. The bursting dataset fields are enclosed within the arrow brackets <> as shown in the image below:

Use the fields with parameters or delivery settings such as Email, Subject, and Body

For further details about Report bursting in Schedule tasks, follow the user guide.

Additionally, check out this video on Report Bursting:

 

Saved Data Filters in Scheduled Tasks

Many times users want to retain the parameter values once selected/entered in the report viewer and use the same set of values when the report is previewed again. To meet this business need, Wyn Enterprise supports Saved Data Filters. This saves time and promotes the re-usability of commonly used filter values in the Report viewer.

With Wyn Enterprise 6.1, the Saved Data Filters can be used with parameters of a Scheduled task as shown below:

Saved Data Filters can be used with parameters of a Scheduled task

To know how to add and manage Saved Filters in a task, follow the user guide.

Conclusion

Scheduling in Wyn Enterprise makes business processes easy and efficient. It establishes a predictable routine that reduces complexity, improves efficiency, quickens decision-making, eliminates repetitive manual effort, and overall, helps to manage your time and energy better.

Paarisha Rana

As a software engineer, Paarisha enjoys the team environment of encouragement and learning. She enjoys reading, aerobics, travelling, and exploring historical places. Paarisha graduated from Uttar Pradesh Technical University (UPTU) at Lucknow (India) with a Bachelor's of Technology in Information Technology, and you can find her on LinkedIn.

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