Support for supervision over drums with data import and delivery

The document describes a full use case for the supervision of elements such as cable drums on a construction site. Supervision is based on information imported to the system from external sources such as Excel® spreadsheets, and then the drum supervision mechanism is defined inside the system. Alternatively, the ability to automatically create drums in the supervisory module based on completed deliveries was shown, along with the registration of specific serial numbers of delivered drums during delivery or its verification.

Drums in the field of electrical works are additional elements that appear during the deliveries. They are not the main material of delivery, as cables are, but they play an important role in the process. Importantly, these drums are borrowed from the manufacturer and must be returned after use. In this case, it is important to be able to monitor such elements, their location and status.

This use case shows how to import such drums into the system from an external data source, e.g. a sheet provided by the supplier along with the delivery. Alternatively, the system allows for greater automation of activities and configuration of the system in such a way that serial numbers of delivered drums are declared at the time of delivery and the system automatically creates appropriate records in the supervision module and initiates its life stages.

If we have an external list of drums - either from the supplier or from the design system - a list of drums that require supervision, we can import them to the system with all the necessary additional parameters using the importer mechanism.

The importer is available in the system configuration section. We go there in the menu related to Integration.

In the first step, we select the file we are going to import. This file can be in virtually any spreadsheet format. The interface allows flexible definition of parameters and then saving them to a template, which can then be used again.

In the next step, we define information about specific settings. For the import of drums, we should set the following parameters:

In a given sheet, in addition to basic information about the drum (type, manufacturer, serial number), we also have additional data, e.g. total length on the drum, ordered length, drum weight, etc. These parameters can be imported into the system by defining additional parameters.

We define additional parameters. Each such parameter is defined using the settings in the dialog:

All defined additional parameters form a list that displays information specific to a given type of data - in this case drums.

If we want the system to automatically "clean" the data in the system that are no longer in the sheet, we can use the delete option. After enabling this option, after importing the data, the system will perform a reverse analysis, i.e. it will compare the data existing in the system with the data in the spreadsheet. If it does not find a given resource (here a drum) in the sheet, it will perform the operations described here.

Operation options available:

Then we move on to mapping the main parameters. All parameters are presented in the upper part of the screen on the first 2-3 rows of the imported sheet. The list allows you to select the corresponding resource parameter for each field in the sheet.

After creating these parameters, we can save the created template to use it in subsequent imports of sheets with the same structure.

The next step is to import. We can do it in test mode. The system will import the data, but these changes will not be saved in the system. This allows you to check the configuration and trouble-free data verification.

The final import changes the color of the progress bar according to the result. If the import was done correctly, it will change to green, if with an error, to red.

Data has been imported :)

After importing, we go to the main view in the system. To resource view. In this case, we additionally selected a filter to show imported elements from only one element, which was described with the delivery number. To do this we did:

(2) filtering by product group (3) selecting the appropriate group (4) filter application

By selecting any drum with the magnifier button, we go to the details of the resource. Here you can see the additional parameters that we imported into the system

To further supervise the drums, we have created the 'Drums' supervision template. It contains several basic states such as Ordered, Delivered, Under construction, Returned. In order for each new drum to have such supervision, we need to initialize it and do it automatically during subsequent imports.

Go to the supervision templates view and select the Initialization - by. category of types. We are adding a new rule that will say that if there is any new resource (unsupervised) whose type is described as 'Drums', then automatically initiate supervision for that resource.

In this case, we additionally initialize the supervision ourselves to speed up the generation of this data. As a result, we get a list of all drums with superimposed states on them that we have defined ourselves.

In order to supervise and monitor the works during the cable works, we will use identifiers (labels) that will be mounted on the cables. To do this, we will use the built-in label designer. To invoke it, go to the supervision view, select the elements of interest and invoke the 'Generate identifiers' action on them. We create a new template.

In the new label print template definition dialog, set:

The result is a list of ready-made identifiers. We print them on a label printer.

For further operations on logging supervision and monitoring, see the user manual and other tutorials.

As an alternative to the above-mentioned method of importing lists of drums from spreadsheets, it is possible to automatically create new drums based on deliveries and information contained therein.