4.12. Creating Custom Reports

Streamline is very powerful when it comes to reporting. It offers a number of different reports discovering various sides of demand forecasting and inventory planning. Streamline's reports display information in both historical and future perspectives. Furthermore, all of them are highly customizable. You can create custom reports based on filters to display a particular set of items that meet the given requirements. On the other hand, you can set which columns of your custom reports to show. In addition, reports can be aggregated by columns and rows.

A unique feature of Streamline is interactive inventory reports. It means that a report is recalculated on-the-fly as you change its input parameters.

Streamline generates reports on:

Inventory planning tab
Inter-store optimization tab
Distribution center tab, and
Reports tab.

The first three tabs designed to report on your inventory. By contrast, the Reports tab allows generating a much wide spectrum of reports, including projected, historical, and current state reports on both demand and inventory planning activities.

Each of the tabs allows for creating custom reports. The Inventory planning, Distribution center and Inter-store optimization tabs generate custom reports using filters. The Reports tab, besides filters, provides additional tools for customization like:

aggregation the report by its rows and columns;
overriding the report; and
changing the report representation units.

You can also combine the capabilities, for example, override the Final forecast report at an aggregated level, and generate an ordering plan based on those overrides.

Below, we show how to create custom reports with examples.

Custom Reports in 'Reports' Tab

To demonstrate the capabilities, we use the Inventory Planning by Month built-in example.

To create a custom report in the Reports tab:

1. Select the required report type from the Report drop-down (see figure below). For our example, we choose the Ordering plan option.

2. Optionally, you can filter the selected report by any columns of the header section. Filters allow you to show items satisfying given criteria. In our example, we would like to see items of the Consumer goods industry with forecast status Approved. To do this, we click the New filter button and configure the filter dialog as shown in the figure below.

The result is shown in the figure below.

3. Let's aggregate the report by the Group column and change the representation unit to Value (see figure below).

4. Optionally, you can hide/show particular columns in your reports using the Show columns button. Let's hide Approval state and Model quality columns (see figures below).

5. Finally, let's export the report to Excel by clicking the Export report button (see figure below).

Custom Inventory Reports

As we mentioned earlier, Streamline displays inventory reports on the Inventory planning, Distribution center, and Inter-store optimization tabs. In this section, we show how to create a custom inventory report in the Inventory planning tab using the Material Requirements Planning example. Customized reports on the other tabs are created in the same way.

Let's create two reports:

Material requirements plan – shows a purchase plan for materials and intermediate items according to the demand forecast of finished items and replenishment parameters.

Manufacturing plan – shows an ordering plan for finished and intermediate items that should be manufactured to cover the demand forecast.

To accomplish this, we will use filters.

To create a report representing Material requirements plan, we click the New filter button. This opens the Filter dialog. Then, we configure it as shown in the figure below.

The result is shown in the figure below.

To create a report showing Manufacturing plan, we click the New filter button again and configure the Filter dialog as shown in the figure below.