Many companies with a variety of systems find they’re dependent on Crystal Reporting to tie them all together.

Technology systems are an ongoing topic of discussion at NeuGroup peer group meetings, whether they are enterprise resources planning systems (ERP), governance, compliance and risk software (GRC) or new treasury systems. This is likely partly the result of a desire for newer, bigger, better systems. But it’s also due to the economic downturn, which has pushed more and more companies in the direction of automating in their attempt to do more with less.

It’s not often that one system is wiped away completely and suddenly replaced by something new. It’s more often the case that systems are phased out and/or integrated into a new system. And because of this, the new system will come with middleware like Crystal Reports, which is owned by SAP, and which helps glue all the parts of a company’s technology systems together.

Crystal Reports is an application used to generate reports from a wide range of data sources, the “wide range” describing the state of most company technology setups. Often times cobbled together from a variety of products from the distant and not so distant past, these systems can be almost Rube Goldbergian in function.

This was one issue discussed at a recent NeuGroup FX Managers’ Peer Group meeting, where many members told of being in some stage of evaluating, modifying or implementing a systems or module for FX management or treasury more generally. For most members in this group, the two systems most discussed were SunGard – with or without the risk module – and Reval, which is still in the midst of absorbing its purchase of FXpress last year. One of the main concerns that arose during these discussions was the reporting functionality of new systems and that no matter what program they had installed there was a “high dependency” on Crystal Reporting, which several thought wasn’t perfect.

This sentiment has been echoed by those implementing GRC. According to comments on a blog from advisory service Corporate Integrity, one writer who has a problem with his company’s otherwise great GRC system lamented that “the most annoying [thing] is that reporting is based on Crystal Reports and is not as flexible as one would like. This means that there will be some effort to build the reports you need. The newest version has a bit more flexibility for reports, but real ad hoc (pivot table like), user built reports are still not possible.”

But, for those trying to corral data from several sources, Crystal looks to be the best bet—at least for now.