Understanding Trial Blending
Trial blending enables you to simulate blending blend lots without capacity restrictions or any effect on real blend lots. You can review the trial blend lot and identify the impact on the blend by changing a variety of measures and the input lots. By changing the input lots and quantities, you change the lot attributes for the trial blend (output) lot. By experimenting and testing different combinations, you can complete multiple what-if scenarios.
When you create trial blends, you can use material any lot (real or virtual) from any blend facility or any vessel. If you use virtual lots as inputs to the trial blend, you must first create the virtual lot in the Inventory by Vessel View program (P31B81). Once you have created a virtual lot, you can select it as an input for the trial blend. Any trial blend that you create is automatically a virtual lot, and the virtual lot indicator in the F31B31 table is set to 1 and is hard-coded.
You can also change the proportions of the contributing input lots. If you re-blend a virtual trial blend lot from the trial blend application, the system uses the same lot number. When you copy an existing trial blend lot, the system copies all input lots and their attributes and creates a new output lot.
You can select different quantities or proportions from each input lot to perform analysis on the output lot. You can change the quantity of the input lot to zero or delete an input lot from the trial blend. The trial blend lot can have hundreds of input lots. The system enables you to over-allocate the volume and end use reservation (EUR) without displaying an error message.
The attributes of the input lots that you use for trial blends may change. Changes can be applied directly, or they can result from dependencies. If you select an existing trial blend, and the current lot attributes of volume, wine status, blend ID, and material type are different than when you created the trial blend originally, the system issues a warning. You receive this warning, for example, if an input lot originally had a material type of G (grape) that has changed to W (wine). You can also verify whether any significant changes have occurred by selecting the Significant Change option. A change of lot number is not considered a significant change and does not trigger a warning.
For volume changes, you can specify a significant change threshold in the winery constants or in the trial blend header. The system uses the value from the winery constants if you do not specify a significant change threshold on the trial blend header. If a volume change occurs that exceeds this threshold, the system issues a warning. For example, if the lot quantity was originally 25 and was changed to 30, the system would issue a warning if the significant change threshold was set at 10 percent. Wine status, material type, and blend ID do not have threshold values.
If lot attributes have changed, you can refresh the input lots with the current lot attribute values. In this case, the system replaces the old lot number with the new lot number and loads all current lot attributes used for the selected input vessels. You can specify the status or statuses at which you can refresh lots in the trial blend header.
You can enter an EUR in the header of the Edit Trial Blends form. The system attempts to match an EUR from the header with the EURs from the input lots. If the system locates a match, it calculates the Percentage EUR, Total EUR Qty, and Contributed EUR Qty fields for the input and output lots. If the EUR in the header is blank, then the Percentage EUR, Total EUR Qty, and Contributed EUR Qty fields will be blank for the input and output lots. Whether the header contains an EUR value does not affect how the system blends the lot or the data in the Lot EUR table (F31B316).
After you create a trial blend, you can validate the blend against defined EUR specifications. You must specify an EUR code in the trial blend header to enable the system to perform validations against the specifications associated with the selected EUR. When the validation is complete, the system indicates whether the validation was successful. To review details of the validation results, you can access the Search for EUR Validation Results form. This form displays the target values and ranges of the specification along with the values returned for the trial blend and shows whether the returned values are out of spec. If they are out of spec and the specification requires a hard validation, the system highlights the specification with the validation error. Otherwise, the system indicates only a warning.
The unit of measure for the trial blend lot is the winery's volume unit of measure in the header. If the input lots contain different units of measure, the system converts those units of measure to the winery's volume unit of measure for the trial blend lot. This includes converting from weight to volume. For example, if one input lot is in tons and the other is in liters, the system converts the measurements of the input lots to the winery's volume unit of measure for the trial blend lot.
Trial blending gives you the flexibility to select input lots from any winery and with any material type. The output lot appears with the unit of measure of the winery on the trial blend header. The output lot uses either a volume or a weight unit of measure, depending on the final resulting material type of the blend. Because the system does not know the final resulting material type until all input lots have been blended, the quantity of the output lot may be inaccurate when the input lots have different wineries, material type units of measure, and material type combination rules.
When you create the trial blend lot, the system does not take into account any configured operation settings. If you want to create an operation based on a trial blend, you must use input lots from the same winery and the same vessel type.
You can view the trial blend lot using any program that you normally use to view lot information in the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Blend Management system. You can use configured grid columns to view the data of the trial blends using the Search for Trial Blend (P31B320), Operation Trace/Track (P31B60), and Inventory by Vessel View (P31B81) programs.
The Edit Trial Blends form contains two grids and enables you to use named calculations for viewing configured grid columns. The first grid contains information for the input lots, and the second grid contains the information for the trial blend or output lot. Using the Edit Trial Blends form, you have the ability to search, sort, or sequence certain rows or columns within the input lot grid. You can specify a default named calculation path to use in the Search for Trial Blend program by using a named calculation user default path or by setting the Named Calculation Path processing option on the Defaults tab in the Search for Trial Blend program. In addition, you can change the grid columns on the Edit Trial Blends form by choosing a named calculation format to use in the grids or override the current format with another format. One named calculation default path specifies the columns for both the input lots and output lot grids. To change the named calculation default path, you must close the program and change the named calculation user default path or the value in the Named Calculation Path processing option. If you do not specify a named calculation path, all of the configured columns are hidden. If you select a blank format, all of the configured columns are hidden.
The system uses data from the following tables for trial blending:
Trial Blend Header (F31B114).
Trial Blend Lot Details (F31B115).
Trial Blend Input Lot Workfile (F31B115W).
Lot Composition (F31B311).
Lot QA Results (F3711).
Blend Lot Costs (F31B31C).
Material Type Master (F31B04).
EUR Master (F31B07).
Lot EUR (F31B316).
Summary Attributes Definition (F31B40).
Wine Status (F31B32).
Lot Owners (F31B315).
Blend ID Definition (F31B50).
Lot Accumulated Additives (F31B318).
Lot Style (F31B314).
Lot Comments (F31B317).
Instructed Attributes Definition (F31B42).
Blend Lot Master (F31B31).
Sample Details (F3712)
You can create configured operations from the Edit Trial Blends form. The input lots that you select become the From vessels for the operation that you enter. All input lots that you select for the operation have to have same vessel class and cannot be virtual lots.