Do We Need Reporting Standards in PLM?

Excellent Post.

I have long been disappointed by the functionality or lack of for reporting within PDM and PLM systems…Over the years, I tapped into the database directly and figured out the table schema and constructed my own reporting solutions…

In previous posts/comment exchange we discussed how the implementation is tricky because of lack of standard processes across companies…this has a big impact on what reports are necessary. In addition, customizing standard out of box reports can be painful and tricky…sometimes these reports could become performance bottlenecks as well.

I would recommend that the PLM software companies offer a decoder ring or data cube so that users can tap in and extract what they need. Better integration with common BI solutions would also be very helpful.

With increased pressures from compliance (FDA/RoHS/Wee/Reach), templates to support standard data requests would be very convenient and useful to the end users within engineering, supply chain and logistics.

Swati, Thanks for comment. I like your idea with a data cube for reporting… This can be an interesting application. However, the biggest challenge for user can be… to understand what to retrieve. I think, in many cases, user actually doesn’t know what type of information they can extract. Completely agree with regards to compliance reports. It is on going and need to be addressed fast. Best, Oleg

Hi Oleg,
I think that in many of the more sophisticated second generation PDM/PLM customers, the idea of reporting has changed. In the past customers wanted a report to look at, and communicated information to colleagues by printing and mailing these documents, now they want common ‘dashboards’ which can format and show live data simply by following a pre-configured url. They want simple applications to allow them to build and configure reporting and analytics data, based on user & role.
The days of sending reports from dept to dept have gone. Users expect their PLM client to be appropriate for their role and the ‘report’ data that they need or need to communicate to colleagues is built ‘on the fly’ and on demand using the PLM applications.
I see this technology and methodology becoming much more mainstream, live reports where a customer can change a process or design and immediately see the impact on sustainability or carbon footprint etc.
Keep up the great work.
Dave

I think that most PLM systems supply some basic reports such as Indented Bills of Material, Summarized Bills of Material, Change Reports, some ability to do metrics around the various processes in the workflow. Where I see a critical weakness is in the ability to create reports based upon data structures over history or using fuzzy logic to do comparisons. My users will run two bill reports and then cut and paste in Excel to do comparisons. In the past I have attempted to automate this and ended in frustration. As far as data strucutures over time, we need to run reports for any given end item and know the history of every part that was used in the structure. What we found was the PLM vendor was giving us the history of the parts on the current BOM but not any parts that may have been deleted during the time horizon. We ended up creating custom reports to manage this. I have other examples where we need historical tracing and I have yet to see a PLM tool that will trace properly.

Oleg, The BOM compare tools I have seen tend to want to compare parts at a single level and cannot do a multilevel compare and want to match at the item with an exact match. Some of our tricks on running BOM compares is that we allow the user to enter a quantity for each part on a consolidated BOM and allow negative quantities. In the result any part with quantity zero is common to both and positive to the positive parts and negative unique to the negative parts. Another tool I developed is based on an older tool called print like matrix. The original PLM was just a cross tab query with the parents across the top and the single level children down the side with the quantity at the intersection. The version I wrote took that a step farther and did a summarized BOM for each parent.
Also we allow break points in BOM and SumBOM generation. We have design content inside purchased parts, some groups must see all parts and will do a purchased explosion and other groups want to stop at the purchased level. I have not seen this feature in any off the shelf reporting tool. I can imagine other scenarios where this functionality could be used as well.