Understanding Lot Attribute Overrides

This section describes the detailed steps that are required to manually override lot attributes. Lot attributes can be overridden only if the configured operation has been set up to allow changes to those specific attributes.

You assign attributes to all bulk material (for example, wine, juice, must, grapes, and finished wine) when you enter them into the system. The system tracks a parcel of bulk material by what is known as a lot. The lot can inherit properties from the block, the operations on the lot, or both. You can enter lot attributes from source documents if you receive the material from an external supplier. The lot inherits all the details from either the source or from what is set in the operations.

Lot attributes are key components of bulk material that are derived from the processes that the bulk material goes through. Wine-makers, for example, often need to make decisions about changing the lot attributes based on observations about the bulk material during the process of instructing and elaborating on an operation. You must be able to enter this information as an attribute of the blend lot.

You can change instructed lot attributes if you find that some data is more or less important than what was originally planned. Historical blend lots are not affected if you change an instructed lot attribute definition. The system calculates active and future blend lots on the most recent definition. For instance, you might change a threshold to reflect a closer focus on that data point, or you might add or remove a style value from a list to reflect changing use of styles. Modifying attributes also enables reuse of an instructed lot attribute for a different purpose because a fixed number of lot attributes exist.

You can define an instructed lot attribute at the implementation level to use across blend facilities. You can set up Instructed attribute definitions through operation configuration or within operations, rather than calculating them from set formulas. Instructed lot attributes can be source data for blend IDs.

An instructed lot attribute is composed of:

• Identifier

• Description

• Status (active or inactive)

• Data type (character, numeric, or string)

You can change an instructed lot attribute from active to inactive status or vice versa. When you change the status of an instructed lot attribute definition to inactive, the system no longer uses it to calculate the value for any blend lots that are created after the change. Setting an instructed lot attribute to inactive enables you to set up definitions before they are used.