Virtual Chuteside Jobs

April 1, 2014 by Cannon Smith

Have you ever finished a chuteside job and then realized that you had given a product to every animal that wasn't recorded in Fusion? Or perhaps you wished you could have Fusion pre-sort animals based on some criteria it already knew about? Virtual chuteside jobs can be used for these kinds of situations.

A virtual job is a chuteside job that can be run from an office computer and is based on a selection of animals. Of course, some things will not make sense in this context. For example, obviously Fusion will not be able to get an accurate weight for the animal. But many things will work just fine.

So how do you create a virtual job? You will first need to get a list of animals that you want to be in the job. You might do this by looking at a previous job and viewing the animals from that job. You might select a lot or pen and then open the Animal list as a child window to get a list of all the animals in that lot or pen. Or you might just open the Animal list window directly and apply a search to get the desired animals.

However you arrive at a list of animals, the next step is to select the animals. (Tip: the animals will show up in the job in the same order as they are listed, so if you need them in a certain order—to apply a tag number, for example—make sure you order the list appropriately first.) Next click the Modify menu button and select Start A Virtual Job With Selected Animals. You can then select a job, set the job up, and get started.

The first thing you might notice is that the job controller has some additional information indicating that this is a virtual job and how many animals are in the job. At this point there are two ways to move through the job:

• Click the Next button to bring in each animal from the list into the job. This works well if there is something manual you need to do for each animal. The job will proceed just as if you were at a real chuteside with each animal coming into the chute. If you can finalize the job before all the animals from the list are brought into the job, the extra animals will not be included.
• If you don't need to do something manual to each animal, click the gear button in the Job Controller window and choose Automatically Do Virtual Job. This will start at the current animal and automatically bring each animal from the list into the job. When it is done, you can review the animals like normal before finalizing.

Fusion is not meant to handle more than 300-400 animals in a normal job and the same is true for virtual jobs. Keep that in mind when you are selecting animals for the job. If you need to work with more animals than that, it is best to divide into multiple jobs.

Virtual jobs are a powerful addition to Fusion and can be very useful in many situations. We hope you give them a try!