CMM inspection info. database

Is anyone currently familiar with CMM dept. that stores their inspection results electronically? If so what info do they store and how do they use that info? Right now I am looking at CMDANA, but I hear that something better is in the pipe. Can this system be used to accurately correlate drops in quality to changes in the inspection reports or is there a good way to use this info. to improve quality.
Thank you in advance.

Author: Aloysius James Tank

I use a variation on Hexagon's VBS to dump text based data from PCDMIS to an Excel based AS9102 report using a cross reference file to correlate the data and then compile the results using another Hexagon executable. Our Quality Engineer then creates custom spreadsheets from the reports and charts them for SPC.

It is much simpler than using DataPage which is too complicated.

Our quality department uses Faro CMM Arms to collect dimensional data which exports the data out as a csv file. We use a product called CM4D from QMC (www.qmc.com) which can take data in pretty much any text based format and store it in a database. Their reporting package uses this database to generate a variety of reports that are configurable with spc, trends, triggers and such. I'm not sure how large your solution needs to be, if you are looking for something small then cost may be an issue. I believe there is a similar product called GDM-3D (www.3dcs.com) but I don't really know anything about it.