Creating new ChangeMan ZMF reports, and or customizing any of the reports delivered with ChangeMan ZMF has always been a challenge. Mostly because it requires expertise in the REXX programming language and you need to have 'some' experience in using ChangeMan ZMF's (green) XML services. On top of that, ChangeMan ZMF does not come with any out-of-the-box charts (only reports).
Therefor, in most ChangeMan ZMF implementations, all such reporting (and charting) requests from any type of ChangeMan ZMF Audience, gets routed to the (usually overbooked) ChangeMan ZMF administrators who might either not have the required REXX and/or XML experience, or don't really like to do such reporting work. Not to forget the effort that may be required when upgrading to a new ChangeMan ZMF release ...
Licensed AbitMORE SCM Reporting (=ASR) customers don't suffer these issues (that's what ASR is all about ... Everybody produces their own reports, no more need for a ZMF admin for that!). But how can you address at least the basic/common reporting/charting requirements without ASR? How about using a simplified version of ASR, for all sorts of requirements common to many ChangeMan ZMF customers. To just mention a few (out of dozens of similar ones ...):
- Empty Packages, which you can't create (easily) with XML, unless some REXX programming.
- Dead checkouts and dead stage requests, which creates a CSV (= the Report Output) containing information of all staged components in all non-BAS packages, that were last changed long time ago (the Report Variable TimeFrame is used to specify the desired Nr of days in the past to consider).
- All sorts of interesting built-in reports (and/or charts!) shipped with the full version of ASR.
Consider the approach to address this issue as documented in the Z-Clues (login required).