Concrete - Suppliers

Table of Contents

About

The Suppliers tab is where the Suppliers, Plants and Mix Design lists are maintained. Both plants and mix designs are associated to (owned by) suppliers.

Adding Suppliers / Plants / Mix Designs

Step

Description

Example

1.

Select a Supplier or select Add.

2.

Select a Plant or select Add.
Adding a Plant will associate it with the selected Supplier.

Click image to enlarge.

3.

Select a Mixed Design or select Add.
Adding a Mixed Design will associate it with the selected Plant and Supplier.

Import Mix Designs

Mixed Designs can be imported using the Import Mixed Designs button. A simple .csv text file is imported to build a list of mix designs for a given supplier. Only mix designs for a single supplier can be uploaded during an import process, but the process can be repeated for subsequent mix designs.

CSV file structure:

A	B
Mix Design Name	Mix Design Notes

Field values should NOT have commas in them unless the field value is surrounded by double quotation marks ( " ).

Managing Draft Suppliers / Plants / Mix Designs

New suppliers, plants and mix designs added in the Field module by field technicians get added into MetaField in Draft status. Administrators need to review and activate any Draft records on a regular basis.

You can easily filter all of the supplier, plant and mix design lists to just the entries that are in Draft status. Click the Show only suppliers with a draft Supplier, Plant and / or Mix Design check box next to the Suppliers search button. Selecting this check box will filter the underlying data to just the Draft entries. If you click on a supplier it will show you any draft plants or mix designs that are associated with that supplier.

To activate a Draft record, simply click the standard Activate button in the data grid. Doing so will make the record visible in supplier / plant / mix design pick lists going forward.

Administrators need to plan for a regular review of Draft records. The Dashboard can also be used to easily identify any concrete sample or bituminous density test records that exist in the system with Draft supplier, plant or mix design records.

It's critical that somebody own this active review of Draft suppliers / plants / mix designs. By making these Draft entries active, they become values that technicians can select in the Field module versus having to type them. In addition, it ensures better data integrity and avoids situations where "Plant 1" and "Plant #1" are entered and really mean the same thing, but to MetaField are really different values.