ColorPoint Manager Reporting

 

Dispense Summary

The dispense summary can be run over a range of dispenses to provide counts and totals as follows:

Dispense count, total press returns issued, neat ink weight, return issue weight, number of dispenses with returns in them, weight of dispensed returns, weight of returns as % of dispensed weight.

 

Simple Formula Sheet

The simple formula sheet provides a simple way to get your formulas into an excel spread sheet for analysis. The report gives the composition of all selected formulas.

 

Job Costing

The job costing report gives a detailed analysis of all inks and returns issued and created in a job. The report can be expanded to include individual materials used. Substrate costs and run length statistics are also taken into account.

 

Simple Design Sheet

The simple design sheet provides a simple way of analysing the coverage and usage factors of multiple designs simultaneously.

 

Design Sheet (Design Estimation)

The design sheet provides a method of creating estimations without having to create a job first. Simply enter the run length required and, provided all of you costing, coverage and usage factors are accurate, you will have an estimation for that design.

 

Usage Reports (Material, Formula, Material Usage By Date)

The material and formula usage reports break down the dispensing history by month. The Material Usage by Date report does the same but allows for custom date ranges to be used where months ends or reporting periods do not correspond to calendar months.

 

Returns Report

The returns report shows the current return stock, with formula code, weight, cost, strength and date created for each return. Scrapped returns are not shown.

 

Return Usage Report

The return usage report allows you to view and compare the creation and use of returns over a number of consecutive periods. The periods supported are, Monthly, Weekly and Custom. Monthly and weekly work to calendar periods. Custom uses the entered date range as a whole and does not split over calendar boundaries.

 

Stock Report

The stock report gives and overview of the total stock levels of each selected material.

 

Stock Valuation Report

The stock valuation report gives a more detailed view of the stock situation. Tick “Include materials with no weight” to see items that have zero or less than zero stock. Tick “Include obsolete materials” to see stock of materials that have been obsoleted and are no longer available for use.

 

Material Batch List

The material batch list gives a more detailed view of the materials in stock. The material batch and serial number details are displayed along with the usable weight of each batch. Finished batches are not shown.

Operating on Selected List Items on ColorPoint Manager

 

Another powerful tool is right-clicking on a selected item or items. Whenever a list is displayed it is possible to right-click on a selection to perform related actions.

Removing Categories

In the following example three materials have been tagged with a custom category ‘To Reformulate’ to identify items I need to work on. I have now finished with the task and want to remove the category. I do this selecting the items I want to change by holding down the ‘Ctrl’ key and clicking each item in turn. Right-clicking on the selection produces the menu shown below.

Clicking on ‘Remove Category’ produces the following tool providing a list of available categories to remove:

Clicking ‘Ok’ removes the categories from the selection.

Send to Dispense Queue

Any material or formula may be sent directly to the dispense queue on CPC by right-clicking and selecting ‘Send to dispense queue…’

The screen area is disabled and a dialogue box appears requesting details of the required dispense:

After entering the weight required, and adjusting the number of repetitions clicking ‘Ok’ adds the request to the end of the queue.

Create Job

Designs are templates for new jobs. To create a job choose the design, right-click and select ‘Create Job’. This opens a new job, prefilled with the details of the chosen design and ready to be given a unique job number and run length. Once created the values provided by the design may be overridden if required.

Job Lifecycle

Release Job

This releases a job for dispensing.

Un-release Job

This is used to stop a job from being used, generally when changes need to be made to the job. If changes are made to a job without un-releasing and releasing again, the changes will be ignored by CPC.

Complete Job

Mark a job as complete. This removes the job from the active job list, removes it from the CPC job list and indicates that no further work will be done on this job.

Other Actions

The following is a list of other actions that may be invoked by right-clicking on either a single item or a selection.

Open

This opens an item for editing. This has the same result as double-clicking on it.

Delete

An item may be deleted if it is not referenced anywhere. The delete option will appear disabled if this is not true.

Report

This provides a list of available reports for the item. The contents of the list will vary depending on the options enabled in your installation.

Scrap Return

When a return is below a usable weight, or otherwise unfit for further use it may be marked as scrapped. This prevents it from being used in remixing on CPC and being displayed on the list of returns.

Finish (Material Batch)

When a material batch is below a usable weight, or is otherwise unusable it may be marked as finished. This prevents it from being assigned when refilling a tank on CPC. Note: this will not remove the batch from CPC if it is currently assigned. To do this, refill the tank on CPC selecting a new batch.

Filtering and the Filter Panel on ColorPoint Manager

 

The filter panel is one of the most powerful parts of CPM. Using the various search fields it is possible to narrow down a large list of items to a small selection making it easy to find individual items.

Basic Filtering

To display the filter panel click the ‘Filter’ button on the navigation toolbar:

Here is a list of materials, unfiltered:

Typing ‘m’ into the code entry area of the filter panel filters the list to any codes that contain the letter m, in upper or lower case anywhere in the code:

This has removed the entry ‘BN1’ from the list.

Expanding the search further to filter on items containing ‘m1’ results in the following list:

Reverse Filtering

Changing the search type from ‘Like’ to ‘Not Like’ reverses the search, showing only items that do not contain an ‘m’.

Exact Matches

Changing the search type from ‘Like’ to ‘=’ changes the result to an exact match only.

Matching Ranges

Finally, a range of items may be searched by entering the starting search, in this case ‘a’, pressing the ‘To’ button and then entering the ending search. Please note the search excludes the last item in the search range, so that searching ‘a’ to ‘c’ gives items beginning with ‘a’ and ‘b’, but not c.

Checking the Exclude box reverse the search and removes these items from the results:

The same principles apply to searching across date ranges, price ranges and dispense weight ranges.

Detail Views on ColorPoint Manager

 

Main

The main panel of the detail view allows you to view and edit the identity of the item. The entries available will vary by the entity type being edited. If an error is detected, the entry area for that field will be highlighted in red. If you move your mouse over the highlight, and an error message or hint will be displayed. In the example below, the code for every material must be unique, and the code M1 has already been assigned to another material.

The other sections of the main panel are described in full in Categories, and Attributes

Items (Formulas/Designs/Jobs)

Items shows the components that go together to make an entity. In the case of a formula, it is the raw materials. In the case of a design or job it is a collection of formulas.

Files

You may attach various files to any entity. For instance materials may have MSDS documentation associated with them. Formulas may have colour specifications or mixing instructions. Designs may have images or PDF specifications for reference. Jobs may have job specific instructions

Make Obsolete

When an entity is no longer required on the system, e.g. a material will no longer be used; the entity may be made obsolete to keep it from being displayed in the main list view. The entity must not be referenced in any other active items. If a material is used in a formula, and you wish to make the material obsolete, there are two choices:

1. Replace the material with another,
2. Make the formula obsolete.

Jobs cannot be made obsolete. To remove a job, finish the job.

Notes

Notes allow you to attach sticky notes to entities. These are useful for recording the reason for a change to a formula, a query about the quality of a material etc.

Related Formulas/Designs

To find which formulas a material is used in, or which designs a formula is used in.

Suppliers (Materials Only)

Materials may be assigned to one or more suppliers. This enables filtering materials by their.

Customers (Designs/Jobs)

Designs and Jobs may be assigned to one or more customers. This enables filtering designs and jobs by customer.

Substrates

A design or job may be associated with a substrate. If a cost is associated with the substrate, this will be used when producing the job costing report based on the run length of the job.

Machines

A design or job may be associated with a machine. If the machine has been assigned a starter weight, this weight will be added to the total ink estimation for each screen in the job.

Formula Specific Actions

Formulas have two actions that other entities do not have.

Formula Sheet

The formula sheet allows you to specify a dispense weight and see the actual quantities of materials required to produce that formula. This is useful when making up formulas in a lab environment or for backups.

Returns

The returns action displays a list of all returns matching the current formula. This can be used to gauge what the current returns status is for any given formula.

Job Specific Actions

Jobs have more actions associated with them to handle all of the accounting tasks required.

Design

The design action links a job back to its originating design.

Dispenses

Displays a dispense history and issues associated with this job.

Release

Mark this job as released at the current date. Once release the job will become available on CPC for dispensing.

Issue to Job

Book ad hoc materials, formulas and returns to be booked against this job code without having to dispense them.

Job Costing

Display a report detailing all costed items booked against this job.

Job Sheet

Display a report of items to be dispensed on this job. This may optionally include a breakdown of the raw materials to be used in formulas and any returns matching the formula codes.

List Views on ColorPoint Manager

 

The most common view of your system in ColorPoint Manager (CPM) is the List View. Typically you will see Name, Code, Colour (on materials and formulas) and date last modified for the current selection of items. The list view can display all of the entity of your choice, e.g. all materials, or a subset of all entities as filtered (see Filtering and the Filter Panel) by the filter panel, e.g. materials starting with “AB1”. All lists are displayed in pages sized to fit your current window size.

The list view has two main actions:

1. Materials – all materials on the system.
2. Orphaned Materials – materials that are not used in any formulation.

Navigating a list of items

The navigation bar is common to all lists and provides the following functions:

1. Navigate to the first item.
2. Navigate to the previous item.
3. The current page number. Type in a new page number to navigate directly to that page.
4. The total number of pages.
5. The total number of items in the list.
6. Navigate to the next item.
7. Navigate to the last item

Customising a list

Lists may be customised in a number of ways.

1. Changing the columns that are displayed. To do this right-click on a column header and change the selection. Column names with ticks will be displayed. Column names without ticks will not be displayed.
2. Change the order of the displayed columns. Click and drag a column header to a new position, releasing the mouse button when the column is in its new position. To cancel press the ‘Esc’ key before releasing the mouse button.
3. Change the sort order of the data in a column. Click on the header of any column to sort the data by that column. Clicking the header again will reverse the sort order, e.g. 1, 2, 3 will become 3, 2, 1.

ColorPoint Glossary of Terms

CPC – ColorPoint Console, the dispenser console.
CPM – ColorPoint Manager, the management PC software.
CPX – ColorPoint Connector, the synchronisation service that keeps CPC and CPM up to date with one another.
Detail View – a generic display of the details of a single entity, e.g. a single formula.
Entity – The building blocks of a ColorPoint System. These are Material, Formula, Design, Job, Return, Substrate, Cylinder, Machine etc.
List View – a generic display of a list of items, whether they are materials or formulas, the list view displaying them behaves in a consistent manner across all entities.
MSDS – Material Safety Data Sheet.