If you have spent any of time with the reporting wizards in Agile PLM, you may have found it useful when getting basic information from your PLM data. After saving your reports, you notice that you’re also able to schedule and send the reports in regular intervals and stay updated on the latest updates as they occur. Woohoo!
But sometimes just when your creative juices begin flowing, you realize there are moments when you require something more, like conditional logic or transformations done to the data prior to reporting on it – and unfortunately Agile reporting is seemingly limited in that regard. If only there was a way to develop configurable reports without having to rely on a developer to create a PX and continuously have to modify it to accommodate new information requests.
With the DocState report generator, you are able to leverage the versatility that comes with PX coding, yet have a configurable templating framework available to create, add, remove, and modify the information that you see in the report output. This is all thanks to the open-source template file that stores the “smarts” of each individual report. Finally, you can choose how you would like to display your data, whether it be HTML, Excel, Word, XML, and more. Make your change to the template file, save and upload into Agile, and your report changes take effect immediately.
This is great and all, but what are the uses for it? Internally for us folks at Zero Wait-State, this tool has increased productivity dramatically when creating our consulting projects and generating a Statement of Work to the customer that outlines all of the project’s tasks and deliverables. Without DocState, we’d have to add all the information into Agile first, then copy-paste or transpose that information into a document, increasing both the processing time and potential complications that result from human errors.
Within your own enterprise, DocState can be a powerful instrument in getting information to a customer or to employees who do not have access to your Agile system. For instance, think about being able to generate ad-hoc compliance reports, letting your customer know that your product has been certified against the latest requirements of EU REACH or US Conflict Minerals. If you have pricing information stored within your PLM, you can export that information to your procurement team to ensure that you’re making all the right purchasing decisions and resolve discrepancies with calculating overall product cost. Finally, the attribute information in Agile can be combined to generate product datasheets which can be useful to your company across all functional areas.
The beauty of a configurable reporting tool is that it has so much untapped potential, and there can be endless possible applications for its usefulness. It is really only limited by your imagination. If you have the data, and you can imagine it, then DocState can turn it into reporting reality.
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