Migrating from FRx to Management Reporter: What Comes Over and What Doesn’t

If you use one of the four Microsoft Dynamics ERPs, you could be thinking about migrating from FRx to Management Reporter, the next-generation FRx replacement.

And you might be wondering what pieces of FRx will get lost in the shuffle. This is a laundry list that I got a couple of years ago from a Microsoft contact. Along with a few of my own comments!

Note: If you don’t use Microsoft Dynamics (either GP, AX, SL, or NAV), you can skip this post.

Carried over in migration to Management Reporter

• Company Information, including Company Code, Company Name, Specification Set, Regional Options, and Period Descriptions
• Specification sets, including Report definitions, Rows, Columns, and Trees
• Account sets
• Font styles

Not carried over in migration to Management Reporter

• Company configuration information
• Generated reports (.frd files)—after migrating report definitions, you can regenerate any historic reports that you want to be available in the report library
• Report definitions that were created by using the Microsoft FRx 6.7 Dimension wizard
• Security configuration, including user names and passwords
• E-mail addresses tied to a report definition
• Data related to Microsoft FRx 6.7 features that are not available in MR

My Comments

• The DrillDown Viewer (.frd) files are not migrated, but you can either create PDFs or retain the DrillDown Viewer program to view the files. (Or regenerate in MR as mentioned above.) This is a link to my post on creating PDFs.  And this is my post on creating a PDF binder from FRx reports if you want to put multiple reports together.
• Pre-migration is a perfect time to clean up those spec sets and get rid of or archive reports that you no longer use. Cheaper, faster, cleaner, more efficient for the migration AND down the road. This is the 1st step at any migration I’m involved in.
• Migrate data before you create new building blocks.
• This sort of goes without saying since I’m preaching to the choir here, but you’ve got to generate the new reports and compare them side by side to the old FRx reports to ensure the numbers are identical. Depending on the situation, I often do this in Excel to ensure nothing gets missed. It’s less dramatic and exciting than having hard copies with tick marks, but it’s still nice to have an electronic proof.
• There most likely will be new reports that will need to be created due to some functionality that’s in FRx but not in Management Reporter. It may just be a redesign is needed, hopefully making the report simpler and easier to follow.
• Last but not least—hang on to your FRx installation for a while!