In the movie Rebel Without a Cause, Jim Stark (the character played by James Dean) famously says, "I don't know what to do anymore. Except maybe die." Sadly, we've had customers tell us that's exactly how they feel when they try to create reports out of their Agile PLM system.
If you're one of the lucky ones, however, you may have found the reporting wizards in AgilePLM useful when getting basic information from your PLM data. And, 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, or when an executive asks for a new slice of the data, you require something more, such as conditional logic or transformations done to the data prior to reporting on it. Unfortunately, Agile's reporting is 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... If only there was a new generation of PLM reporting tools... If only there was a rebel with a cause...
Well, now there is! Meet the next generation of Agile PLM reporting: DocState. Part of our PLM Software Automation Suite, DocState is a simple and cost-effective tool that unlocks and shares the power of your Oracle Agile PLM data in a format that meets your specific company's document requirements.
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 here 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. We also use DocState to generate interactive web reports that we use to display project information during weekly status meetings. We show weekly breakdowns of allocation per resource by project and deliverable - even displaying task information on mouse-over. Without DocState, we’d have to export or copy-paste the data, and then transpose that information into a document - increasing both the processing time and potential for human error.
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. Or, if you have pricing information stored within your PLM, you could export that information to your procurement team to ensure that you’re making the right purchasing decisions and resolve discrepancies with calculating overall product cost. You could even combine the product attribute and related object information in Agile 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 a reporting reality. Be a rebel with a cause and revolutionize your PLM reports!
