Material Identification & Cataloguing
For the past couple months we've been methodically adding capabilities to the Admin and Designer applications by way of a robust material identification system. There are literally 10's of thousands different materials used across all of our customer accounts and in nearly 10,000 cases there were duplicate part numbers with unique material names. Our team sifted, many times, through these lists, identifying duplicates or missing letters or ways to merge these materials into a more succinct list for each of you.
The result is a brand new Material Library found under the tab 'Materials' within the Admin application. This houses every material name + part number combination your company has ever used. It will tell you every work area and unit it can be found in.
You can ADD (click the green plus button in the upper left) or EDIT (check the box next to any material and hit the EDIT button in the upper right) any material.
You can even leave 'Design Notes' to be visible to your designer when they add this material to any given step. Perhaps they need to be reminded to add a particular tool at the same time.
The above popup will appear automatically to alert them, but they can also be reminded of any Design Notes by hovering over the icon here:
Now back to the Library - you can also DELETE any material. But please be careful as this will effect every step that uses this material! You will be asked to verify the desire to remove the material entirely from the library, but be warned that this deletion is permanent.
Powerful Tool for Tracking
The Library is fantastic for searching, adding, and editing materials throughout your unit step instructions. But the thought of identifying every use of a material and whether or not you wish to edit them all may be daunting. So we are giving you even more powerful tools in tracking each material.
In each row of the library you will find a column called Units. If the material is used in your step instructions, there will be a number in this column. This number is a link - click that and a modal will appear telling you how many of your units using this material are in Draft only vs Published.
You can then download a CSV file of either or both of these lists.
We give you everything - from the Unit it's included in to the very Step Name you'll find it in. And for those of you using our API's or who want to drop the step directly into a URL to find it - we provide the stepID needed to track down the very step using any part number you've selected. We even provide 'Step Status' to indicate to you if perhaps you're hunting an Archived unit (and not just a Draft/Published one).
Consistency in Designer
One of the major benefits this library project has garnered is the identification and labeling of every material part number in each company's data. In the past, your Designers would type in a material name and then a part number and have no idea if they mis-typed it in comparison to a previously used material name. Now, every material is ID'd, and when the designer types in a part number it will automatically find matching materials.
In this example above, as the designer types "5WH" you see that a part number of "5WHF2" exists already. However, they are also able to add 5WH as it's own part number if they wish. In the event that they select 5WHF2, the material name field will automatically fill in the information stored in the material library.
This guarantees part number and material name matching for all future use cases.
Note: some of you may be wondering what happens to all of the duplicate part numbers with unique material names from the past - don't fret! We've built a historical name-matching database table that will use previously stored names (even if unique from the current material library values) for steps generated before this current deployment.
Finally, we've added a new "Notes" section to each material that you add to a step. Any/all edits to the material on a step will require a re-publishing to be pushed to Compass.
These exact comments will be portrayed in the Materials sidebar in Compass. Use this to provide extra details (e.g. 'cut lengths' or 'sizing' or really any other content that isn't specified in the material name or part number).
We know this amazing new feature allows you to bring consistency, traceability, and an added layer of quality to your step instructions going forward. As is always the case, if you see something we can do to make this feature even better, please let us know!
Other Deployed Features:
- Previously, when a step was Saved in Designer, we provided a snapshot thumbnail of that step that was visible from the unit's step list page. However, in the event that a background image was missing (even behind other content like text boxes or PIPs) the thumbnail would appear as if we had no imagery for that step to review. This would result in a broken image icon appearing in places like Designer: Under Review, and particularly on the step itself in Compass. We have now made it so that the step preview will show the full content of the step, including the 'upload image' text/icon. This should aid in reminding your staff to use a background image on every step - even if it's just a plain white placeholder.
Bug Fixes:
- It was brought to our attention that if an incorrect password was used for the HQ login page, or perhaps an incorrect Access Key was used when entering Compass, there was not any proper indicators for the user that this had failed. We have since remedied this, alerting the user so they can make another attempt.
