A manual attribute allows you to add context to your event that must be manually entered by a person using an Event Period Form.
Examples of where this might be necessary are:
- When you are using Flow for your OEE and Downtime reporting, and you need the operator to manually enter the reason for each downtime event.
- When you need an operator to select which product you are running in a batch.
- When you need to enter the amount of stock produced against your Product Run event, but the amount of stock is based on a physical count done in the warehouse.
As was mentioned when discussing Manual Measures, there will always be reasons for manual data entry, and the same is true when it comes to events and event attributes.
To configure a manually entered attribute, right-click in the Attributes Tab and select New > Attribute > Manually Entered
Give your attribute a name, and configure the properties available to manual attributes.
There are not many properties to configure for manual attributes: only Description and Enumeration, both of which were explained earlier.
Note though that you can choose to link this manual attribute to an Enumeration. If you do this, then the user entering the attribute value will be limited to a drop-down list of items defined in the enumeration.
For example, if this is a "Downtime Reason" attribute on a "Downtime Event", you could limit the reasons that the user can select to a list of predefined/agreed cause codes.
If you do not link the manual attribute to an enumeration, the user will be able to enter anything into the attribute value. This is useful where you need the user to enter a comment, or their observations, etc.