Material Lot Tracking Concepts
Every monitored machine has a job assigned to it. The job has a defined material formula. This formula can consist of up to four raw materials. Once a job is running on a machine, its associated DCM enables the entering of Material Lot IDs for each of the raw materials.Lot IDs can be vendor or user-defined. Lot IDs create an audit trail between the lots of raw material fed into a machine and the tote boxes of finished products which come out of the machine. If a different raw material lot needs to be used on a running job, the new lot id and material name can be entered at the DCM.
A delay timer is available for specifying the amount of time to elapse before a new material lot is used on the current job. When the time expires, the current material lot is replaced with the new material lot. The current material lot then becomes part of the historical audit trail.
Material Lot Tracking is an auditing feature that traces material lot usage. A material lot can be traced to a specific tote box. Each time a tote box becomes full, an operator presses the tote change button on a DCM, or a material lot changes for a job, the event is recorded. These events form a lot history.