3DEXPERIENCE Report Template Administrator RGD

How to Accelerate Report Creation for Your Product Development Processes

It is no secret that the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE® platform provides a digital environment that unites your entire organization – from design and manufacturing to service and marketing – as well as external stakeholders under one collaborative, interactive business platform. However, a lesser-known advantage of this platform connecting people, data, and solutions in a single environment is that it also provides the ability to create the cross-functional reports needed in product development processes, in real time.

All engineering and manufacturing organizations need to generate documents and reports for traceability and management purposes and this blog will highlight a tool that has helped our customers to accelerate this process.

Report Template Administrator on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is a powerful tool that improves productivity and reduces human errors by enabling users to define report templates that integrate data from different sources on the platform into one report. It automates information gathering and report generation from a single source of truth, and speeds up data analysis with intuitive reports. Some common report examples are:

  • Change Impact report detailing what design changes have occurred, components affected and approvals
  • BOM report detailing the parts lists with classification of material, suppliers, etc.
  • Work Instruction report for shopfloor users with images, instructions and measurements
  • Traceability report to show which requirements have been verified and validated by the product design
  • And many more – the possibilities are endless!
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3DEXPERIENCE Report Template Administrator

The Report Template Administrator encompasses 2 roles based on the type of user: Report Template Designer and Report Generator. The Report Template Designer user builds report templates from the 3DEXPERIENCE data model. The Report Generator user generates reports in a specific format based on organization needs and business rules. This could be the same user in your organization.

Report Template Designer

Report Template Designer offers a drag and drop web interface to construct a report template from the underlying data model. Users select the type of data they want to use in the report and the tool displays all related information, such as existing attributes, relationships, types and methods connected to this type.

The report template offers various structural elements to organize the report information, such as tables, paragraphs, graphs, etc. The template designer drags over the structural elements and data to put together a report template.

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For example, say we wanted to display a table with the name and revision of a requirement, the user would choose Requirement as the report parameter. This loads the related data model.

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The user would then drag over a table as the structural element and drag the corresponding attributes for name and revision into the table cells.

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Report Generator

Once the template definition is complete, the Report Generator user can choose from a number of formats – such as Word, RTF, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, CSV – to output the report template into. Company specific templates can be used for the output formats to standardize the look and feel of the report or to include legal disclosures.

The reports are generated in the background, which is beneficial when generating reports for large complex data sets. A status is displayed against the report being generated to let the user know that it’s being processed in the background. Once the report generation is complete, the user gets a notification in their inbox.

The generated report is accessible to users on the platform or can be downloaded and shared with external users. As with all data on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, access control can be applied to the reports and templates to ensure only the appropriate people can view or modify them.

The following picture is an example of a Work Instruction report generated in PDF format.

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Improve Productivity and Reduce Human Errors

To summarize, the Report Template Administrator is a powerful app that provides all-in-one functionality for all your product development reporting needs. It saves time and ensures data quality by enabling users to define a template for each kind of report needed and automatically generating cross-discipline documents from the extraction and manipulation of real-time information on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

Template designers use a graphical web interface to define templates and hence there is no additional client install required. The reports run in the background and notify the users about the status, making it ideal when working with large complex sets of data.

Here’s a short demo of Report Template Administrator:


Questions?

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about the 3DEXPERIENCE Report Template Administrator (RGD), contact us at (954) 442-5400 or submit an online inquiry.