Features of an industrial report and dashboard software product

5 Myths of Automated Industrial Reports and Dashboards

  1. Automated Report Generation is Hard

  2. Not Flexible Enough to be an All Encompassing Solution

  3. Not Reliable Enough for Automated 24x7x365 Operation

  4. Won’t Integrate with Existing Automation Systems

  5. Report Generators are Not Event or Batch Aware

 

Let’s take these one at a time.  The world of report generation has changed drastically and there is a new option to give you reports that you’ve only dreamed of.  But let’s explore the past, and the myths that are wide spread.

Report Generation is Hard

That was so true.  Hard means labor intensive, with programming intensive tools.  Not the sort of thing you want to be digging into at the end of a project cycle.  And that’s usually when you are digging into reports, once you have your system running and are generating the data to create and test your report.  Funds have run low and System Integration hours are getting scarce.  So what do you do?  Well, if you are like most, you start scaling back, and only generate the reports you absolutely must have.

Now imagine if reports were easy to create.  No programming.  An easy to use tool, empowering anyone on your staff to create a report.  You can have your critical reports AND you can have any other report that you might consider.  Reports are the best way to drive continuous improvement.  They can be easily shared throughout your organization and they can be saved for future comparisons.  We’re talking about Dream Report of course.  Only Dream Report makes reporting so easy, you can have all the reports you want, and not just the reports you absolutely need.

Report Tools are Not Flexible Enough to be an All Encompassing Solution

This has also been very true.  Report Generation tools are available from many vendors, and only enable reports from their products.  And even at that, they are typically in the form of an Excel Add-in, certainly not a solution delivering reliability or scalability.

Dream Report is a vendor neutral offering, designed to work with them all.  With over 65 data interfaces including proprietary drivers, industry standards and business standards, Dream Report will connect to every database you have, from any automation or business system.  Moreover, Dream Report will perform calculations across data sets and deliver reports that integrate all your data sources.

Not Reliable Enough for Automated 24x7x365 Operation

This stems from a combination of poor tools to choose from, lots of customization and code development to craft a solution and a long list of missing features.  Vendor specific products, or products (business tools like Crystal Reports or Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)) just don’t cut it in industrial applications.

Dream Report delivers on many fronts.  First, for the most demanding applications, Dream Report will operate in a redundant fashion.  Two nodes that talk with each other and coordinate fail-over for continued operation.  But in simpler applications, redundant printers may be all that is required.  Dream Report is designed for 24x7x365 operation and just naturally gets the job done, without any custom code or user planning.  Worried about performance?  Tell Dream Report which processors to use, or how many reports to archive, or how large a database to create.  Want to avoid tampering with the report database?  Dream Report includes powerful security that controls access and actions based on roles.  And if you want enterprise security, Dream Report delivers Windows Active Directory integration.  It’s all just a few clicks in a configuration window.  Version management?  Audit Trails? Yes indeed.

Won’t Integrate with Existing Automation Systems

Integration means more than pulling data from automation system databases.  It means integrating for the triggering of reports, or adding controls to operator HMI displays to show report generation status and give operators the opportunity to interact with the reporting software, with controls they are expecting and able to work with.

Dream Report accomplished automation system integration in several ways.  First, variables in the automation system can define report naming and report triggering.  Operator displays can integrate buttons that will command Dream Report to perform functions like generating a report.  A specialized Dream Report Run-time Management Console Active-X Control can be embedded right into an HMI display to give the operator a powerful report generator control interface.

And there’s more.  Dream Report delivers a leading edge Web Portal.  This can be embedded into an HMI display to enable manual data entry for reporting.  It also enables the triggering and viewing of reports.  Finally, if files are all you need, Dream Report neatly generates files and directories that are easily integrated with your existing automation system.

Report Generators are Not Event or Batch Aware

Back to the issues with minimal products or products from other markets, trying to play in the complex world of industrial automation.  They have been made to work, with lots of custom code and long hours, but they suffer in areas of reliability and their total cost of ownership.  An again, we’re back to doing the least, because it’s so hard to do.

Dream Report is both event and batch aware.  That means Dream Report will track variables and perform actions accordingly.  Over 5000 hours on a motor?  Generate a service report automatically that summarizes its term of operation, comparing it to the last, and including instructions on what to do.  Maybe you have a variable that denotes a Batch ID.  Dream Report can use that to coordinate data from other sources.  Requesting a report on Batch X can trigger the proper historian time-based queries, automatically.  Skipping a phase in the process?  That can trigger a portion of the report to be omitted, automatically.  Need manual data entry, or an approval process?  Yes, those features exist too in Dream Report.

There are many other myths.  This could easily have been the 10 Myths of report generation, but the ones above are the most compelling and highlight why Dream Report is the most popular automated report generation solution specifically developed for Industry.

Download Dream Report today and see how it works in your application