Optimize PCS Report Configuration to Streamline Enterprise-Wide Compliance Reporting - Virtual Brew 09/18/25

In this Virtual Brew we learned how to enhance efficiency and save valuable time with tailored, repeatable reports that make enterprise-wide compliance reporting easier than ever.

Transcript

Introduction and Agenda

[Presenter]
Good morning, everyone. Today we’re going to be talking about optimizing your PCS report configurations, in an effort to have streamlined reporting across your whole company.

Quick agenda: we’re going to level-set for everyone on reporting basics — what they are, what types of reports we offer — and then dig deeply into some of the more advanced customization options available in our reporting platform. We’ll talk a bit about Themes Management, and finish up by talking about how to automate all the work you’ve done.

What Are Reports?

PCS comes equipped with a reporting engine that lets you build reusable templates that query your data quickly and efficiently. They let you view your data from different angles — standard reports, delinquencies, exceptions, as a couple of examples — then dig deeper by adding filters and customizations, and get that data out where it needs to go in a meaningful format.

Templates can be used as often as you need. They’re preconfigured for consistency across your entire company, or you can just build one for yourself. If you find you need to run the same report over and over, you can build that report as a template and reuse it as many times as you need, without reinventing the wheel.

Out-of-the-Box Report Templates

Out of the box, when PCS is first installed, there’s a bunch of templates already included, used as a foundation to build your customized reports on. They help answer common questions like: do I have any exceptions, do I have delinquencies, have I finished my survey work? These templates set the stage for you to build customizations — layouts, filtering, paper size, and so forth — so you’re not starting from scratch every time you run a report.

Report Types: Columnar Reports

The different types of templates we have: columnar reports are what you’d expect — a data grid, rows and columns — and that data can be exported as a PDF or CSV.

Report Types: Paper Forms

Paper forms are meant to look like sheets of paper from the past — forms you might have written into by hand. Here’s an example: an atmospheric inspection form. Rather than showing your data in rows and columns, it shows that same data but gives you the flexibility to drag and drop, color-code, and even include pictures on your form reports.

Report Types: Graphs

We’ve also got graphs — any numeric value across any module and facility type can be graphed in PCS, either over time or over distance. If you’re looking for trended analysis, you can take rectifier readings and graph them over time to see how your ground bed is depleting, or, if you have several types of surveys — CIS, DCVG, annual, periodic — you could overlay all of that on top of each other based on distance, for a more holistic look at the health of your CP system.

Report Types: Summary Reports

Lastly, summary reports are kind of like a pivot table in PCS — all reporting on the same data, but letting you take another step and do calculations on it: counting the number of facilities you have, how many have inspections from this year, how many don’t, how many are meeting criteria, what percentage is remaining — any of those questions that come up all the time, especially from superiors, can be built into a summary report and that drill-down format can be run across your whole system.

Navigating Reports in PCS

PCS is a menu-driven application, so most interaction comes from the menus across the top — there’s a section for Reports/Graphs. When you click that dropdown, depending on the module you’re in, it’ll look a little different. We’re in the CPDM module here.

It starts at the highest level with PCS Reports, which are cross-module reports — they let you take CPDM, ACM, ICM, and ISM data and combine and summarize it at a high level. These are the only reports that are cross-module, and they only include the common elements between those modules — think delinquency reports, or inspection graphs where you’re overlaying different kinds of data sets.

The next level down is module-specific reports — this entry is called CPDM Reports. These aren’t cross-module, but they are cross-facility-type within the module you’re in — so I can run inspection reports across all of the CPDM facility types (test points, rectifiers, bonds, galvanic anodes, and tanks) combined into a single report using a CPDM report.

Below that is facility-specific reports, broken down by each individual facility type within the module. Each facility type has a set of built-in reports — information, inspection, maintenance, and exception are the primary ones, duplicated across each facility type — so you can drill down as deep as you need to.

Customizing Layouts

Now let’s dig into how we actually customize these reports — what you’ve seen so far are just the standard, out-of-the-box templates. The first and easiest thing to customize is what you see. You’ll configure layout themes for columnar reports, summary reports, graphs, and paper forms — you’ll have control over which fields are present in your report and the order they appear in. That ordering is what we call a layout — the same concept and functionality as customizing layouts on the data grid: take fields from the left-hand side of the screen, move them to the right-hand side, and put them in order.

Paper Settings and Sizing

Below that, in the bottom-left corner of the screen, when you’re looking at columnar reports specifically — reports intended to print on paper — there’s a tab that says Paper Settings. That whole window zooms up when maximized.

The paper size estimate shows the layout you’ve selected, the order of the fields, and how much space they’ll take up on your sheet of paper. Some fields allow word wrapping; some are grayed out, meaning you can’t resize them — mostly fields with a defined length, like structure pipe-to-soil, which is always going to be a small, fixed number of digits, so it’s shrunk down as small as possible to maximize your available space.

Paper size is a really important setting these days — I don’t think people are printing these reports much anymore, mostly printing to PDF. So I’d recommend taking your paper size as large as possible — Tabloid is 11 by 17, giving you the most room — and changing your orientation to landscape for even more room. This is especially important for reports like the CPDM survey report, where you want to show a lot of data on a single report.

If fields in the paper size estimate section show up in red, that means they’ll wrap to the next page, and your report format won’t look very readable. Playing with paper size, orientation, and font size (minimum and maximum) will help. We actually auto-scale the size of the text based on your layout and paper size and orientation, making your fields as big as possible. In this case, the maximum is set to 10, the minimum is set to 3, and my current size is set to 3 — keep in mind these font sizes aren’t literal — a size 3 here isn’t like setting a size 3 font in Microsoft Word, where you’d need a magnifying glass. It’s a scaled size — 3 is fairly legible, especially if you’re using a PDF editor where you can zoom in.

Print Options

At the very bottom of the screen, there are checkboxes for different print options. A few of the most important: record counts, reprinting your group headings on each page, and printing the filter options and report heading.

Reprinting group headings on each page gives you context as you’re scrolling through your report, or if you print it and your pages get out of order — each page will show exactly which area of the hierarchy or route you’re looking at. Record counts is straightforward — it calculates the total number of records on each page, which is a helpful quick check if you’re familiar with your assets and expect a certain number of facilities to show up.

The last one, printing filter options in the report heading, combines all the filter options you’ve configured and puts them at the top of the report — so 10 years from now, when you run a similar report, you can see exactly what filters were used, with no question about how to recreate it or whether you were filtering something out that you’d expect to see.

Filters: Ad Hoc vs. Permanent

What you’ve seen so far is fairly straightforward. The real complexity — and the real value — comes from using filters, so that’s where we’ll spend most of the rest of this presentation.

There are two kinds of filters: ad hoc and permanent — the same concept you’d find on the data grid or anywhere else filters can be applied. Ad hoc filters are temporary — added to your report template for a specific purpose, and once you run the report and close PCS, they’re gone. They’re meant for getting down to something quickly without setting the same filter every time.

If you find you need the same ad hoc filter over and over, create it as a permanent filter instead. Permanent filters are set up in the Customize screen — at the top right, go to Customize, then down to the filter section, and you’ll see a similar-looking filter input box to an ad hoc filter, but filters added there persist.

You set your fields, choose the operators, and what they’re equal to. For example, the very first one here says “currently active facilities only” — the underlying filter is “facility currently active is yes.” I’ve recaptioned that to plain text so people don’t have to figure out what “facility currently active is yes” actually means. That one’s straightforward, but once you get into things like “facility not currently active is yes” and double negatives, advanced logic gets confusing — sometimes it’s easier to rename filters into plain text so anyone coming in understands what they mean.

Permanent filters are really important for automation — if you want streamlined, consistent reports, you need consistent filtering across the board, and that starts with permanent filters.

Filters: AND vs. OR

There are two filter logic types in PCS: AND filters and OR filters. An AND filter means all conditions must be met — if I’m filtering on two or more fields, only records meeting every condition will show. A good example is a delinquency report: you only want active facilities (one filter) and delinquent, or past-due, facilities (a second filter) — you don’t want inactive or non-delinquent facilities cluttering your delinquency report. That’s an AND filter.

OR filters don’t care about overlap — they’re saying, give me this thing, or give me this thing, either/or, without needing to overlap. A good example is exception reports: I want to see low test point readings, or shorted casings, or delinquent facilities — in any of those three cases, I want the record to show up on my report. That’s an OR filter.

Combining AND and OR Filters

What about combining AND filters and OR filters? PCS supports this in the customization options, and you can see it in exception reports. Looking at the standard test point exception report: the box in the middle of the screen, outlined in blue, with “inspection data is between” — that’s an AND filter. The red box below it is an OR filter — but these are groups: a group of AND filters and a group of OR filters.

How does a group of AND filters talk to a group of OR filters? We take your AND filters, if there are multiple, and pair one OR filter with your AND filter to form a combined AND filter. So: “inspection date is between the beginning and end of the year” AND “AC exception contains exception” — that’s one group. Then we set those inspections aside, and the filter runs again: “inspection date is between the beginning and end of the year” AND “structure IR-free volts is less negative than -850” — taken together as another AND filter, and added to the previous one. That’s how you get the combination of AND filters and OR filters.
The logic can get pretty deep. The exception report does a good job of showing AND filters and OR filters working together, but you can recreate this in any report type — inspection reports, delinquency reports — by going into Customize and the filter section and adding your own OR group. If you’re struggling with the logic, think about how exception reports work and build it the same way — or call our customer support team, they’d be happy to help.

Dynamic Date Ranges

One last thing on dates, specifically for building streamlined reports you can reuse over and over — month over month, or year over year, for monthly or yearly inspections. Instead of filtering on “inspection date is between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025,” PCS lets you filter on dynamic date ranges — so I can say “beginning of the year” through “end of the year” instead, and as the calendar rolls over to 2026, my filter picks up that date change automatically, without me having to update it.

This is really important for automation, especially email reporting — you don’t want to go through every report every year updating filters just because the calendar year changed. Let PCS do the heavy lifting with dynamic date ranges.

You can also set date ranges equal to other fields — for example, if my inspection date is equal to my effective date, both dynamic, both variables rather than hard-coded dates. You can get pretty fancy with your filtering this way. At the end of the highlighted example, it says “end of the month plus 30 days” — you can add a certain number of days, months, or years to your end date if you want to look at multiple years or months of data dynamically.

Building a Fully Custom Report

Once you understand how to customize report appearance and how filters work, the next step is building a fully custom report that incorporates all of it — your layouts, permanent filters, custom sort themes, and print options. You build these just like in the screenshot, for each individual report, so all those settings are saved — I don’t have to change my layout theme or my filters every time. I can package it all into a custom report and just click it and hit run, with everything preconfigured.

These can be public or private. Public means everyone with access to that PCS database can view and use the report but only an admin can make changes to it. Private means only the logged-in user who created it can see it, use it, or change it.

So, admins: set up your public reports with the layouts and filters they need to be, so you have consistency across your entire company, and then tell your people — hey, use this annual report for all of your annual inspections — so you have consistent formatting across all your different regions and the different people gathering your data.

Themes Management

If people are really heavily using the Add Report button and custom layouts, an admin can periodically go into Tools and Themes Management and clean up any layouts that may be unused. This reduces the number of menu items and layout choices people have to sift through, improving consistency and streamlining report creation.

It also lets you take someone else’s report and make it public — if someone built a really nice report and you want everyone to use it, an admin can go into Tools and Themes Management, find the report, and check the Is Public box, making it available for everyone.

Automating Reports via Email Notification

Lastly, public columnar reports can be automated through email notification — a way to have reports automatically run, attached to an email, and sent to a distribution list of your choosing. Recipients don’t necessarily have to be PCS users — they can be anyone with a valid email address.

It gets even more useful with business rules for why reports are run. For example, with a delinquency report, I can say: if I have delinquencies coming due in the next 90 days, send me a report so I can take care of them. Once it gets down to within 30 days, send that report to me and my boss, so my boss understands my workload. And once it’s within a week of being delinquent, send it to myself, my boss, and my boss’s boss, so there’s automatic escalation.

You can build all kinds of custom business rules like that, without rebuilding the report for each person — it already accounts for hierarchy, so you can run the same inspection report for everyone, and it only shows each person what they’re configured to see within that hierarchy by default. And again, you can include people who don’t have PCS access, as long as they have a valid email address.

Closing

We’re right at time — really appreciate the time this morning, everyone. I don’t see any questions in the chat, but thanks a lot — I’ll see you next time.