Wednesday 21 May 2014

Changes to the formula screen to incorporate fixed % additives


Recently we have added an additional column to the formula items screen to make adding materials at a fixed % easier.

FixedMaterial

When you tick the ‘Is Fixed’ column for a given material it means that the parts of that item will not be changed when the formula items are re-apportioned.  This is useful for scenarios where you know that a certain material must always make up a certain percentage of a formula.  So if you increased the parts of the red in the screenshot above to 60 and then had the software reapportion the formula  (which it would do automatically when you pressed the save button), the result would be as follows.

FixedMaterial2

As you can see the green has become roughly 1/3 smaller than the amount of red but the amount of medium in the formula has been unaffected.  This feature was in previous versions of ColorPoint Manager but was specified as a property of the material and once a material was marked as being a fixed % additive it was considered fixed in every formula.  The new system is more flexible in that it allows materials to be made fixed on a case by case basis.  It is important to note that ticking the ‘Is Fixed’ check box does not mean that you will not be able to change the parts of the material manually, only that they will not be changed when the formula is re-apportioned.

Friday 16 May 2014

Finishing Stock Batches

When a tank of raw material is used up and the weight falls to zero (or below), ColorPoint Manager highlights the batch in red. This is a hint to the user to check the status of the stock and if appropriate, to finish the batch to prevent it from being used again.

Used-stock-batches

Finishing the batch also keeps the Stock Overview tidy, showing only batches that are actually useful. To finish a batch, or a selection of batches, select the items from the list and right-click. Choose Finish from the contextual menu that opens.

Finish-stock-batches

If the Finish menu item is greyed out, this means there is a batch in your selection that is still allocated to a dispense valve. In this case, the normal refill procedure should be carried out first before finishing the batch.

Why Have Our Batch Numbers Changed?

Some customers have noticed on newly updated software that the format of the Dispense/Return Batch Number has changed.

The old format was Dyydddxxx:

  • D – batch number type: dispense
  • yy – year
  • ddd – day of year (1 – 365)
  • xxx – dispense number for the day

The new format is DyyddNxxx

  • D – batch number type: dispense
  • yy – year
  • dd – day of year using 0-9 and A-I
  • N – dispenser number.
  • xxx – dispense number for the day

This new format allows us to support multiple dispensers on a single installation of ColorPoint Manager by identifying the originating dispenser in the batch number. It also does not increase the length of the batch number. This is important where we print the batch number on labels as a barcode.