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Material Entity - Manual Split#

Estimated time to read: 3 minutes

As with other entities, it is useful to use the Name Generator feature with Materials to ensure there are no typos or any similar mistakes when creating a new Material. This is, names will always be unique regardless of any interaction with the Material by different users or operators, or changes in shifts.

The reasoning behind this example is that you may need to split a Material in two or more parts. Why, because your Resource may not be able to process the full quantity of the Material you have.

As the system does not allow Materials with the same name, when a Material is split a new name will be created. Moreover, the new name of the Material that was split, should have some relation, at the name level, and other as needed, with the Material it was split from.

When you manually split a Material, the system does allow you to provide a new name, but this is not good practice as it may create confusion in future. Hence, you should use a Name Generator via the DEE Action called ResolveNameGenerator.

To see or apply the Name Generator that you want to use, follow these steps:

  1. In the ResolveNameGenerator DEE Action, go to Views and select to see the Code.
  2. Scroll down in the code or find SplitMaterialInput.

  3. In that section of the code you will find the name of the generator being used for the manual split:

    Screenshot showing a manual split process with a highlighted code section containing the name of the generator being used.

Note

The default Name Generator for this case is MaterialNameGenerator, but you can manually copy/paste the name of the generator you want to use, or created, into the code (as seen above). If you do so, you must set the code effective for the desired Name Generator to be available.

For this particular use case, where the Material will be split manually, the SplitLotNameGenerator was created, and the tokens were configured so that the relation of the split Material is close to the Material it was split from:

Screenshot showing a manual material entity splitting process with a highlighted field for entering a custom name generator.

In the Tokens section of the Name Generator page above, you can see its structure, and immediately perceive that the split Material will take the Name of the Parent, plus a ., and will use a Rollover Counter for its Calculation Mode. What follows is an image of the Parent Material:

Screenshot showing a manual material entity split process with an unclear input field containing "oc ef @ am > 4 HO 3 O FF B@ & Ee H a:".

Therefore, on splitting the Parent Material, using the given tokens, and not providing a name, the split Material will be named accordingly and the split quantity will be shown in the Primary Quantity field:

Screenshot showing a manual material entity splitting process with an unclear input field containing "oc ef @ am > 4 HO 3 O FF B@ & Ee H a:".

You can see that the Name Generator convention was followed and you have a unique name for the Material that was split.

Note

For more information, see Name Generators.

Info

DEE Actions are available for older Name Generator features. For the most recent features, you will use Configurations as shown in Material Entity - Automatic Split.

Next you should read Material Entity - Automatic Split.