All the current versions of ManuSoft contain a powerful feature called the Report Generator. This routine lets you create custom reports on your data, so you can extract the information you need quickly. In today's blog post I'm going to give an example of what you can do with the Report Generator. In the example I use version 6.4 of ManuSoft. I'd also recommend trying this in a play system first, if you're new to the report generator.

The scenario: you have a particular raw material and you want to find all manufactured parts which include this raw material in its bill of materials.

If you only want to search for one material you can just select the standard report format, then click printout. In the search criteria form that pops up search for "Material" equal to and enter a stock code. The generated report should list a part code and a description on each line, corresponding to a part which uses the material code you searched for. The image below is an example of the search I mean.

Now that report is reasonably useful, but we probably want to see some details about the material being used, for example the quantity. To do so we will need to create a new report format of our own. 

To start off, open the report generator menu and select the part file. Then choose the standard report format from the drop down menu. Once the standard report is selected and appears on the screen, click the build/copy button to the right of the format selector. Give the new report a name and click ok. The image below shows this.

Now to show some details about the material we need to add a reference to the material file in our report. To do so click the "Secondary" button in the bottom left of the screen. The display in the Format Layout should now show two rows of headings. The first is from the standard report and the data under these will come from the Part file as usual. The second row is for the Material file, and allows you to select the information you wish to show about the material items. Add the following columns in this order: "Stock Code", "Units", "Price ($/U)", Quantity. If you did this correctly your report format should look like the following screen shot.

Before we print the report, click on the Primary button (in fact you have to as the print button will be "greyed out" while you edit the secondary columns). Select the material details column on the primary file and delete it. The reason for doing this is that we already have too much data and the font on the generated report will be far too small if this is the case.

Now we're ready to print. Click printout and use the same selection criteria as before. The new report should show details about how much material each part actually requires, and the associated cost per unit.

Another useful feature of this report is that if you do a wildcard search (say for all materials beginning with a specific prefix) then you can see all uses of a related set of materials quite easily, as per the sample report output seen in the image below.