Written by: Co-Founder and CTO, Brandon Cummings
After months of hard work, the FlowPath - Facility Management Platform team is excited to release our new Reporting Suite to our customers!
Behind the Scenes
When I first wrote the article announcing FlowPath, I wrote about 4 things that FlowPath prides ourselves on, all 4 still ring true today: ease of use, enhanced team communication, customers own their data, and advanced reporting. The new Reporting Suite release cements our commitment on all four of these areas, heres how.
Our industry of Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) is historically bulky and 30 clicks away from progress. When we first released our reporting for FlowPath (March 2020), it wasn't very useful, but it was still better than some of our competitors:
We then realized that reporting was a foregone afterthought for most of our competitors. Most competitor reporting modules, if they had a reporting module, were composed of a million different drop-downs trying to be "everything to everyone" with little guidance on how to accomplish your goals.
Many of our customers wanted to be data driven organizations, but few could easily extract the data needed. So, we revamped our reporting to support out-of-the-box reporting modules for main FlowPath objects: Work Orders, Inventory, Equipment, Vendors, Finances, and Labor Hours.
These modules came without setup and were available to all customers immediately on signup:
Surprisingly, the above gave us an edge over our competition. Simply providing a thoughtful starting point to data drive insights was better than most of our competition. Every module could be filtered by most items tracked within the platform, including time, work orders, equipment, etc...but after creating this, we found ourselves stuck. We were adding more and more features, collecting more and more data that was not being reported on, and our current reporting setup could not support showing the new data.
With a commitment to our customers of making our platform easier, enhancing team communication, owning their data, and gaining insights from reporting, we set out to create the best Reporting Suite in the CMMS market.
FlowPath Reporting Suite Major features
Out-of-the-Box Reporting
Our team has spent months talking with customers and prospects on what could be useful to gain actionable insights from their data, and our default dashboards and templates do just that. Every customer has 7 dashboards populated by default with a total of 92 panels of single metrics, visualizations, and tables. The 7 dashboards are: Work Orders, Equipment, Inventory, Labor Hours, Vendors, Preventive Maintenance, and Inspections.
No Query Limits + Supersonic Speed
Our first pass at reporting was pretty slow loading and sluggish. The data scientist in me was upset by the lack of insights that could be drawn on limited datasets due to our slow infrastructure. Our customers who switched from competitors were used to only being able to query 6-12 months of data at a time, which did not sit well with me and I did not want FlowPath to slip into this mindset as so many of our competitors had let happen. FlowPath is meant to be easy, give people access, and be much better than the competition. I'm happy to report that I'm no longer upset, you can now query with ease ALL of your data and super FAST, with no limits on query size and speeds in the milliseconds.
Here is loading a dashboard with 15+ queries on 10 years of actual data:
Easy Custom Dashboards
You can now create as many public and private dashboards as you need, checkout our help-center articles here to learn more about the dashboards and customizing them. All dashboard panels are drag and drop, resizable, and filterable:
Sharing Reports
With enhancing team communication in mind, we've made it very easy to share dashboards and panels you create with team members by either scheduling an email on a periodic cadence, copying a shareable url, or printing the dashboard immediately. You can also download all table panels as CSVs with full datasets of your choosing, it's your data, you should be able to access it easily.
What's Next?
With this release in the wild, the FlowPath team has set a great foundation for the future, so what's next for our reporting?
1) Machine Learning & Predictive analytics - our new and improved reporting infrastructure is setup perfectly to apply machine learning and predictive analytics on your datasets. So over the next couple of quarters, you will start to see updates on how FlowPath is going to start predicting and forecasting insights for you and your team.
2) More data objects - as we move into new features and data objects, you can anticipate energy and space management reporting, as well as building automation reporting, just to name a few :).
Ready to see FlowPath's Reporting Suite in action? Head here to schedule a demo and learn more.
