Case Study: Dynamic Report Builder for Manufacturing SaaS

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Our client is a SaaS ERP provider who creates applications for the manufacturing sector to manage their operational data including orders, customers, inventory, financial information and production processes. As their business increased, so did the demand for custom reports.

Reports are extremely important to a manufacturing company’s decision-making processes, but there are different views of the same data for various departments, roles, and objectives. Therefore, as the client’s business grew, so did the need for custom reports for their customers, and with it, the requirement of new testing cycles, and ongoing maintenance.

This was not a sustainable or scalable business model.

The primary issue is not the inability to report, but rather the inflexibility of the current process.

Customers of the SaaS ERP provider want to have their data in different report formats. For example, in one instance, a customer may want a summary of orders, grouped by customer. Another customer may want to know only the date(s) when their order was shipped. Finally, another customer may want their orders broken down by operational data.

With each request for a report, the ERP company invested in developing an application to meet the needs identified and that resulted in the following three issues:

• Engineering dependency for even minor reporting adjustments
• Additional costs associated with building standalone reports
• Longer response times to customer requests

The client did not require a full-scale business intelligence product. They weren't looking for elaborate dashboards or predictive analytics. Just something practical and quick that could provide a flexible embedded report creation tool within their ERP platform. 

We built a dynamic report builder specifically for their SaaS ERP product. Our objective was not to produce a Business Intelligence software product but to create an intuitive report generator that an administrator could use without having any technical abilities.

The end result was a structured and flexible self-service report generation environment.

The process of reporting begins with selecting an entity.

Users will select which ERP entity they want to build their report around. Then the application will provide a list of all the relevant fields for that selected entity. This allows users to only see those fields that are relevant to their report request and thereby eliminate confusion and maintain flexibility.

After the user selects the entity for their report, they can select which fields to display in their report. They are not locked into a pre-defined report structure. They can: 

• Select the specific fields 
• Rearrange the order of those fields
• Build an output structure tailored to their requirements

Many times manufacturing reporting requires layered sorting logic. 

Users can add an unlimited number of sorting parameters to the report builder. They have the ability to prioritize sort requests and structure their data output exactly as they need for total granular control without added complexity in user interface.

Filtering is critical for reporting. Users will have the ability to apply an unlimited number of filters simultaneously.

This allows users to effectively narrow data down. Rather than exporting raw data and manipulating outside of the ERP system, users can create targeted reports directly. The filtering logic was designed to be both powerful and intuitive. This flexibility provides non-technical users with an improved way to work and not be overwhelmed.

Different use cases require different data display formats. To allow users to specify whether to paginate reports or display the entire dataset at once, we have included this option. Although there are significant performance implications, we have tried to balance user preference.

Users with larger datasets are able to paginate for performance advantage while users that need to export everything will be able to produce complete result sets.

Previously, any new reports or report modifications required development work. Over time, that model proved to be inefficient and costly.

Once the solution was deployed: The administrators were able to have full control over all report creation.

The engineering group had less dependence on the engineering group. The average time to create a report was reduced significantly.

The ERP platform is now more flexible and able to accommodate changing business needs.

Most importantly, this provided a way for the company to eliminate future costs incurred from developing custom-made reports on an individual basis. Instead of paying multiple times for the same one-off development projects, the company made a single investment in a highly capable reporting building tool that now supports nearly all types of reports that their customers may require.

Through developing a dynamic and entity-driven report builder, with advanced sort/filter/column customization/export functionality, we assisted this manufacturing-oriented SaaS ERP company in reducing costs associated with report development and increasing their scalability, while empowering their end-users with more control.

The company now has a flexible, self-service reporting tool that will continue to add value to all of its customers, without increasing the burden of additional development costs on their company.