Introduction

When a flock is reaching it's market age, it will be put on a withdrawal diet. When this flock is in a house with multiple bins, the line for premium (grow out) feed will be closed to reserve it for the next flock. Systems like Bin Sentry have no configurations that maintain this, so that system will continue to take readings on that bin.

In LIVE, reports run at a house level, so ending inventory is aggregated for all bins on a house and reported as a sum total. This causes issues for New Live Mills, who are seeing the sum total of both ending inventories on their reports even though the flock is close to market age and is eating feed out of one bin.

To resolve this, we'll need a way to mark that a bin is "suspended" from receiving automated ending feed updates, managed in LIVE. CONNECT will need to check this setting before staging records and not stage or commit the reading if the bin is in this suspended state.

Prerequisites

To suspend bins from receiving automated ending feed updates, we will need:

• Access to Aeros LIVE with house permissions and affiliations.

• Access to the Aeros CONNECT Feed Ending Inventory feature.  

Configuring Bins in Aeros LIVE

Facility Management → House → Feed Bins

A new setting has been added to the feed bins assigned to a house. This "Suspend Import Effective Date" will be used by CONNECT to prevent any automated readings from being imported for this bin effective on this date, until the date is updated or removed.

When flocks cycle out of the house the date can be deleted, or updated to approximate for the next time the bin should not be read and this will allow us to manage this without needing to go in on the exact day that a bin should be disabled to set this.

The mappings in CONNECT also have an "enabled" bit that can be set, too. If this bin needs to be disabled for a time longer than a flock placement it is recommended that the mapping be disabled in CONNECT.  

Live Inventory → Feed Plan

When a bin is suspended, we'll see the effective date that it is suspended on in the feed plan grid.

if we want to manage that suspension date we can now do it from the feed plan! The house link below that used to only display the house feed plan configuration is now a button link to the house itself. Clicking this link will open the specific house, where we can manage any setting on the house including the suspension date!

I click the button for the house. The house form appears. I change the suspension date for the bin and click "Reset" on the feed plan- we can see that it has been updated.

Developer's Note: This link is a new feature that we are excited for everyone to use. We did some testing on the impact of updating house settings while the feed plan is opened and while it does not cause crashes, we still recommend that the feed plan is reloaded using "reset" once house settings are changed! This will guarantee that any changes take effect in the feed plan before things are recalculated. 

Verifying Suspended Imports in CONNECT

Facility Integration → Feed Ending Inventory → Create New

We'll open the wizard to create a new batch.

We import our ending feed readings. Notice that test bin 2 was not imported.

If we check the commit messages, we can see that a message is reported that the reading was skipped because the bin is not in effect.

Let's return to LIVE and remove the suspended bin setting, and create another batch. Here, we can see that the reading is now added to a batch.

When we check the import messages tab, we can see another feature in play here- Records that have already been imported for the Bin Sentry last read import time are skipped.