FabTrol Insights

Proper management of material grades is one of the most important features in your material management software.  Grades should always be included in the import and your software should quickly and easily “learn” about grade callout conflicts and never bother you about that particular conflict again.

Grade and other material definition conflicts are problems because:

• Your shop, your detailers, sub-contract detailers and various detailing software don't always define grades in exactly the same way.
• If you don't import the grade you are always depending on human memory or someone's assumption to keep things straight.
• Your nesting/multing system won't be as effective if some of your stock is defined as A572-50 and some as A572 Gr. 50; and it's even worse if you allow even  more variations during your bill of materials import.  Optimization engines lack the human skill of recognizing when something that looks different is actually the same thing and will provide inefficient answers when the grades aren't all synchronized.

None of this should pose a problem for your material management software and you shouldn’t accept software that “simplifies” this by ignoring or assuming grades during the import or nesting process—this could cost you thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars in back-charges. Your software should screen grades and manage translations during every import. It should be trivial for any user to teach the software a new translation from something like A572.50 or A572 Gr 50 to something like A572-50.

FabTrol MRP and it’s new software, FabTrol Pro and FabTrol Shop:

• Let you know about the material definition discrepancy (unless you've previously discovered and covered it).
• Make it easy for even an inexperienced user to teach the software that the new label should be imported as A572-50 (if that's how you choose to call out the grade).
• And never require a user to define this for the software again; the software learns and adds to its knowledge of type, size and grade callouts during each import, requiring less and less of the user.

FabTrol MRP has always provided easy-to-use translation tools and FabTrol's new software FabTrol Shop and FabTrol Pro can even start out by importing material definitions that match your most common file source.  Still it probably won't match definitions from the next software or detailer. So just define your types/sizes and grades to match ASTM standards (or your most common source of import files) and then you can quickly and easily teach the software about variations as they occur.