Project report: only return the most recent projects

[LukaszMatyszewski]

Dear All,

I need to develop a project report that will only return the most recent projects, whether by project date or custom form date. Its part of wider requirement where we are trying to feed Workfront projects data into externally managed reports (excel). What we trying to avoid is manual processing of the data available by standard reporting tools.  Has anybody attempted to find a solution for such requirement? I will appreciate all feedback!

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @LukaszMatyszewski,

Designing, developing, and licensing such Reporting solutions to run in real time right from within Workfront is one of our specialties, which I’d be happy to discuss further via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com.

Regards,

Doug

[LukaszMatyszewski]

Hello Doug,

Appreciate the offer but its a temporary solution while our company moves that external data to future ERP system.  All we currently need is a custom filter to pick the desired set of projects from WF. 

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

My pleasure @LukaszMatyszewski,

Since the term “the most recent projects” could mean a number of things, I’d suggest you explain your requirement a bit further, which might lead to additional custom filter suggestions.

Regards,

Doug

[Madalyn_Destafney]

Hi there, not sure I understand the requirements of the report. You'd need to decide on a 'most recent project' definition. There are native fields available to pull for project reports that you can set, either project entry/creation, project actual completion. You can also set a variable to have it always pulling the same cadence, like projects created [this week], projects completed [today], etc. 

[LukaszMatyszewski]

Dear All,

Let me try to explain this a bit better. Here is the simple scenario,

Our projects manage development, updates of  product content as well as production runs among other things. In effect we might hold a record on several projects related to same SKU (aka Pdata WM Product Code) maintained at different times. In our business we have approx 4k SKUs which go through some sort of amend in their product lifecycle. These amend rounds are always managed by seperate projects. In most cases a product will not reach more than 2-5 rounds but there are exceptions. Example below:

I'm looking for a report that displays a project managed most recently, while the key parameter would be any of "project dates" or custom form parameter (date) - whatever is easier to look up. Given the excample above I want the report only to display project number 2486472.

I hope this helps and apreciate any feedback!

Kind regards,

Lukasz

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @LukaszMatyszewski,

If I'm following your "managed most recently" requirement...

• although it would be possible to create a Project report with an EXISTS filter that matches across all projects with the same PData WM Product Code, to my knowledge there is no way to differentiate the MAX date (e.g. Planned Completion Date) among those candidates (although I'd be delighted to learn otherwise, if anyone cares to share The Trick), so
• instead, you could export all the data (similar to your example) to Excel and use a formula in Excel to highlight (and then delete all but) "managed most recently" Projects, but since that could be time consuming and error prone, (again, having now clarified your requirements, in case you'd reconsider)
• with only a few hours of development, our Magic Reports solution could provide a report that returns only such managed most recently projects along with whatever columns you've pre-defined as being useful so that you could run them from Workfront (in real time, anytime, over time) and download directly into to Excel with no further effort required on your part

Regards,

Doug

[LukaszMatyszewski · Accepted solution]

Thanks Doug,

Firstly, I apologise for any confiusion.

MAX date / Group functions is precisely what I thought off. At this point I managed to resolve this challenge with an excel function and thanks to that the process is not laborious. 

Still, if anyone has an idea how to implement it in workfront I'm confident that more use cases can emerge.

kind regards,

Lukasz