Ask any SyteLine team what slows them down and reporting is almost always in the top three. The data is all there — jobs, BOMs, POs, ledgers — but between canned reports, DataViews, SSRS, and Excel exports, getting a specific answer often takes longer than the decision it supports.
The result is the report backlog: a permanent queue of unanswered questions, because someone technical always sits between the question and the answer.
Why backlogs form
A plant manager who wants 'scrap by work center, this month vs last' files a ticket. IT queues it. Two weeks later the requirements have changed. Multiply that across every department and the backlog becomes structural — it never clears, it just grows. Excel becomes the pressure valve, and now you have dozens of disconnected spreadsheets, each a stale snapshot one keystroke away from a bad decision.
Natural-language reporting changes the shape of the problem
Instead of translating business questions into SQL or report definitions, an AI layer does the translation — against the same IDO layer your forms already use, with the same permissions. A user types Show open orders past promise date by customer and gets a live, filterable table in seconds.
$ sl query "scrap by work center this month vs last"
┌────────────┬───────────┬───────────┬─────────┐
│ Work Center│ This Month │ Last Month│ Change │
├────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────┤
│ CNC-3 │ $4,210 │ $2,980 │ +41% │
│ WELD-1 │ $1,880 │ $2,140 │ -12% │
│ ASSY-2 │ $ 940 │ $ 910 │ +3% │
└────────────┴───────────┴───────────┴─────────┘Because queries run read-only through the policy engine, nobody can ask their way into data they aren't permitted to see. Role-based access control applies to every query, and every query is logged.
You don't rip anything out
The pattern that works for most shops: keep built-in reports for formal documents, keep your BI tool for board-level trend dashboards, and put natural-language reporting in front of everyone for day-to-day operational questions. That removes the bulk of ticket volume and lets your developers build instead of running report requests.
Where to go deeper
We wrote a full breakdown of every SyteLine reporting option — built-in reports, DataViews, SSRS, Excel, BI tools, and AI — in our [SyteLine reporting guide](/infor-syteline/reporting). If you want to see natural-language reporting on your own data, [get started free](/get-started) — it installs in about 15 minutes and runs entirely on your hardware.