When moving to new software the screen people are most curious about is usually the report screen. It is opened on the first day, an empty chart appears, and it feels like a disappointment. In fact that is the normal state: a report is not something you build, it is something that accumulates.
A glass reporting system finds something to say once the record it feeds on has built up. An analysis screen opened with the first week of data shows only that week, and that week is the average of nothing. A few months later the same screen shows which glass type moves most, which process waits, and which customer brings how much work.
That is why reporting is left to the end in the order of going digital. First the order record, then the cutting plan, then production tracking; reporting rides on top of all of them. Going in reverse means the report has to be fed by hand, and reports fed by hand are abandoned in the first busy week.
For a report to be useful, what it measures has to fall out of the work itself. Every piece scanned leaves a timestamp; once those timestamps accumulate it becomes visible which station piles up. Nobody fills in anything extra for it. Data gathered as extra work is unreliable, because on busy days it is not gathered.
As scale grows the question the report answers changes too. Reporting for a glass workshop mostly looks at how much work went out this month; reporting for a glass factory compares station loads. In reporting for a glass dealer the question shifts towards stock turnover. The underlying record is the same, the angle differs.
What a report does not measure has to be stated as clearly as what it does. Cutting efficiency shows how much of a sheet was used but not whether that sheet was actually cut; those are separate questions. If the scope of a figure is not written down, the same figure is taken for two different things by two people.
One last warning: a report is a tool for deciding, not for convincing. Where a figure came from has to be traceable. If reporting for a glass business cannot show which orders were added together, that figure does not end the argument, it only starts it.