Understanding Winery Constants

The winery constants provide default values for a blend facility. You use the winery constants to set up next numbers and other default processing for the blend facility. In addition, you set up units of measure, bottling, and costing information.

On the General Information tab, specify next number values for work orders, operations, bills of lading, and bond serial numbers. These fields are required.

This tab also enables you to specify the default virtual barrel or container type. The system uses this default value when you create a virtual barrel tank (VBT) or a virtual container tank (VCT) for an operation.

You can specify threshold percentage for survey gains or losses. When the survey gain or loss is outside of the threshold percent, you must enter a comment with the operation before you can save the operation. If you adjust the operation and a survey gain or loss no longer exists, the system displays the comment until you remove the comment. If you enter zero as an allowed operational gain or loss, no threshold for acceptable gains or losses exists and the system does not generate an error message when the operational loss is less than zero percent.

You can also specify a default threshold value for significant change. The system uses the value that you enter in this field to trigger a warning when you review an existing operation and the Before lot quantity is not equal to the previous Before lot quantity with a variation that exceeds the threshold specified here. The system also triggers a significant change warning when the blend ID, material type, or wine status of the Before lot has changed. For trial blends, the system uses the significant change percentage to trigger a warning when the volume of the original input lot, when added to the trial blend, is above or below the specified threshold when compared to the current volume of the lot.

If you want to use the facility to create virtual lots, you set the virtual lot indicator. You also use the virtual lot indicator to specify the type of virtual lots that you want to create for the blend facility. You can use different types of virtual lots, for example, virtual Competitor lots or virtual To Buy lots for different trial blend scenarios. The value that you specify here for the virtual lot indicator is a default value for virtual lot records in the Lot Master table (F31B31).

For spirit operations, you can specify the default spirit volume. This setting is used to determine whether a blend facility calculates the volume of a spirit as proof or as alcohol. In addition, you specify a quality assurance (QA) alcohol attribute. The system uses this value to determine what alcohol value (that is, which QA test result) to retrieve and use when calculating the spirit volume. The specified QA alcohol attribute appears as a percentage. You must enter a QA alcohol attribute if you want the system to calculate spirit volumes.

On the Unit of Measure tab, you specify units of measure for variables such as volume, weight, and pressure. These units of measure are stored in the Unit of Measure UDC table (31B/UM).