How can I set up a basic PI Date Range?

Introducing a Date Range into your Report will unlock much more functionality regarding how you can report your PI data, and what data can be reported.

In this article we will cover the setup of a basic Date Range in a Report. This Date Range will report out performance data for the same time-period of several PI's.

• 1. Setting up the Report Layout
• 2. Setting up the Report
•  3. The Final Report

1. Setting up the Report Layout

First, you’ll need to create a new Tabular Report Layout if you do not currently have one you wish to work with. To do this, open Pentana Risk Classic and open the Report Layouts screen. Select New > Tabular Layout.

Once created, the next step is to add the Report Date Ranges field into the Report Layout. When viewing your Layout, select the Fields tab, followed by the ‘…’ button. From the drop-down menu, choose Performance Data. Insert the Report Date Ranges field into your Layout.

2. Setting up the Report

Now that the Report Layout is ready, we need to set up the Report. In Report Central, select New > New Report > PI Reports > PI's Report. Once you have created your Report, open the PI Query tab. The first step is to define the PI's you wish to report on. In this example, we’ll be using three number PI's.

These PI's all have a Start Date of 01 April. When using Date Ranges, it’s important that all PI's involved have the same Start Date. Having PI's with different Start Dates would mean that calendar periods used to calculate other periods will not match.

This will result in Date Ranges appearing more than once, because the same time period label (Q1 2015/16, for example) could refer to a completely different period of time. If you’re intentionally reporting on PI's with different Start Dates, you can make use of the Overlay function to combine Date Ranges.

This example Date Range has been set up to provide us the Value for the Months: April, May and June. Broken down below are the different steps involved when setting up the above Date Range:

Title: Each Date Range requires a name. Depending on your Report Layout settings, this may be labelled in the final Report. We’ve labelled this ‘April – June’ to reflect the data that will be collected by the Date Range.

Type: This determines how the range used is calculated. A fixed Date Range will calculate a range using a Start and End Date. Alternatively, we could use a relative Date Range to set the range based on the date that the report is generated on:

As we wish to report on the Months for April, May and June, we will use a fixed Date Range with the Start and End Dates set accordingly.

Frequencies: Here we define what frequencies we wish to display data for. For this example, we have checked Months, as we wish to report on the Values held against this frequency.

Columns: In this section, we have checked Value. This is because we wish to report on the Values held against the Months. Earlier during the Report Layout set up, we specified that the Columns would be chosen from this selection.

Now that we've set up the Date Range, the final step is to generate the Report using the Report Layout that we created earlier.

 3. The Final Report

In the screenshot above, we can see our final Report. The three months we defined in the Date Range are pulled through onto the Report, with the Values held against those periods.