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For Windchill PDMLink 10.2, is there OOTB capabilities (or minor customization setup) to be able to generate a report/log of a workflow? One of our business requirements is to show via a PDF or some doc who signed off on certain tasks of the workflow, when they signed off, or if they rejected it. The basic things we need to see are:
1. Did the role accept/reject at a certain task
2. Who was assigned to that role and executed the accept/reject
3. The date and time when this was accepted/rejected
4. Show this information in a pdf or doc or xlsx format
Dustin,
in the community there is a group about Reporting
There is also a huge document with lots of report ready to use, divided in sections.
Take a look at Resource for reporting
Hope could be helpful for you.
I've set up this type of thing extensively. A few thoughts / comments:
1. Have to be very careful about what is being reported on: PBO (e.g. a Change Request); related Team Instance Roles / Users; related workflow process; workflow Tasks (executed by those in the Team instance); Task data selection / entry (e.g. approve/reject, or comments, or addressing workflow variables - which may be stored in the database directly and reportable or may be workflow variables only which is not reportable - and generally may be better reported as what "path" the workflow went down); also may be interested in reword loops in the workflow process (e.g. how many times did checker A reject designer work?).
2. It's a bit trickier when there are multiple Roles / Task and / or multiple people per Role in a Task but can be done.
3. Timestamps are generally easy to report on, using the Work Item Finish / Last Updated info. It helps a lot to put "checkpoints" in the workflow template specifically to help with reporting (when did it get to this point). You have to be a little bit careful with daylight savings time though for looking at how long things took over say a year.
4. If not using Windchill reporting fully (e.g. Cognos), then ideally, set up Excel to show the data, and re-run the queries(s) from within Excel via macro.
Reporting is very useful and powerful and worth the effort. It's one of my favorite areas of Windchill. The new query builder UI in 11.0 helps quite a lot in determining Types and Joins, and it's worth installing 11 just to be able to use that even if you don't plan to have 11 in production for a while.