Reporting is a key aspect of any application. Tensoft recently hosted a webcast on some of the different ways of getting information and data reports out of Tensoft SemiOps. During this session, I covered several different report types and provided a basic review of the data elements, as well as a demo.
Below is a partial transcription of this presentation:
“The reporting tools can be used for SemiOps application to get information from the modules. I will start off with some pros and cons and give you some flavor of when you might use some of these report types.
Delivered reports. These are the reports when you go into the application and you go into the modules and run them, they pull up a separate webpage. They are really SSRS (SQl Server Reporting Services) reports but they are delivered with the application. These are prebuilt and generally cover 70-80% of the user needs for the data. They are already ready for you to run, query and download to Excel if need be.
SSRS is Microsoft’s web-based reporting tool. All those reports are based off that. They are very customizable, you can schedule emails, have them delivered, and you can run them any time and download them to excel, and save them for later or filter as needed. Of all the different types of reporting, this is probably one of the most complex, and usually requires somebody who is familiar with building SSRS reports, or creating SQL views, but you can also make them fairly simple as I will show you later.
Excel Queries and PivotTables. These are ways of getting information directly from your application from the tables. Usually they are straightforward if you know what you are looking for. These are usually for lists, generally if you are getting raw data, whereas SQl reporting services can be a bit more fancy. You can do sub-totals, add use-friendly filters, and things like that. You can also link directly to the data sources. Usually folks use Excel when they do that. If you are on-prem, you can link directly to your server either remotely and query that way and query the pivot tables off of them. These are usually fairly detailed with format type of information.
If you are on cloud where most of Tensoft customers are moving to, it will be the Odata and Power BI web-based APIs and tools. This is really where the focus is at Microsoft and at Tensoft, and that’s web-based API’s and tools. We use a service called Odata, which is a standard protocol of applications of programming interfaces. It uses strong encryption keys to access data on a multi-tenant cloud environment. Odata is really the structure, you can almost think of it as a query or a view; whereas Power BI is a reporting tool. It’s a robust web-based reporting tool. You can view it on your cell phone or have a dashboard for executives on web. We have got some pre-built views that can be delivered. If you have a finance or IT person with decent knowledge of reporting, its fairly easy to build your own custom dashboards in Power BI.”
You can view the Power BI dashboard examples built for the Semiconductor and IoT Industry in this short video. To learn about some of the API connections for Tensoft SemiOps and DemandOps, read this blog post. For additional information, contact us today.