Commodities, or ingredients, are used in various places in Fusion including in building rations. This video shows how to create a new commodity and how to properly set up its attributes.
Time: 9:28
When we talk about commodities in Fusion, we're referring to anything that goes into a load of feed—macros, micros, additives, even water. Fusion has tools for managing your commodity inventory along with pricing, dry matter percentage, and other attributes which change over time.
To define a new commodity, let's start by opening up the Commodities/Ingredients list window. You can do this right from the Fusion Setup window. You can also access it through the Fusion Admin menu bar under the Setup menu. In this window, you'll find a list of all your commodities.
Let's create a record for Barley to show you how it's done. Click the New button to get started.
In the "Name" field, we'll type in "Barley." If Barley happened to be a medicated ingredient, we would put in a withdrawal time in the next field. That helps Fusion keep track of feed-related withdrawals for individual cattle. But since Barley doesn't need a withdrawal period, we'll leave it at 0 days.
We'll leave the next two fields unchecked because they don't apply for Barley. When would you actually check these boxes? Well, if you ever need to add water to a load of feed, you'd create a commodity called "Water" and check the first box. Fusion will handle the water ingredient differently and only one ingredient can have that box checked. The other checkbox comes in handy for tracking micro-ingredients. If you enable it, Fusion will keep track of inventory down to the thousandth of a pound or kilogram.
Moving to the Thresholds area, you can use these fields to reduce mistakes later on. For example, we could enter 80% and 90% in the Dry Matter Attribute fields. This way, no one can associate a dry mater percentage with barley outside this range. If you enter values for the Ration Inclusion fields, then Fusion won't allow a ration to be created with a barley inclusion percentage outside those values. The Ration Inclusion fields may be more useful for micro ingredients.
If you don't want a threshold, just leave the field value set to zero. It's fine to only choose a lower or upper limit if that's what you want.
Let's talk about the default attribute values. Setting the dry matter percentage, NEM, and NEG values here simply provides a starting point for Fusion. Don't edit these values when the dry matter percentage changes in the future. Instead, use the commodity attribute system which we'll explain in just a moment.
Everything we've talked about so far applies across all your locations if you happen to have multiple ones. Now, let's take a closer look at the location-specific settings. When you select a location, the fields on the right change to show values specific to that location.
The first three fields come into play when Fusion generates inventory-related reports. In the first field, you can set a quantity that triggers a low inventory warning. If this commodity has a maximum capacity, like if it has to fit in a bin, put that quantity in the second field. Leave it at 0 if there's no maximum capacity. The third field tells Fusion how many past days to consider when estimating your commodity usage pattern. For everyday, consistent use, a low number like 7 days usually works best. But for irregular use, you'll need a higher number. You can fine-tune these numbers as you go, based on your needs. Fusion uses this value to predict when you'll run out of a commodity.
Now, let's chat about the markup fields. Fusion doesn't automatically apply a markup when billing. Instead, it offers ways to set your pricing periodically. One option is to create a new billing price based on some markup formula from the cost. When you go with that option, these markup fields come into play. You have three choices for the markup type: None, Percentage, and Dollar. With "None," no markup gets added. With "Percentage" and "Dollar", a markup based on the value in the Markup Amount field is applied.
One thing to remember is that if you add a new location down the road, you'll need to come back to this window for each commodity to set these values for the new location.
When you're all set, just click "Save" . Next, you need to set up the initial attributes for this commodity. To do so, make sure the Fusion Core menu bar is current, click the Attributes menu, and choose New Ingredient Attribute. We're going to set the dry matter percentage for Barley as of today, so we'll enter Barley in the Ingredient field. If you have multiple locations, you'll be creating a separate attribute record for each one.
Using the Attribute field, we choose which attribute we are changing. As you can see, there are several to choose from. We'll pick dry matter and the move on to Change Date. Many attributes, such as pricing, are often set retroactively. For example, it might be September when you do your August billing so you would create a Bill At attribute backdated to August 1 before printing off the August invoices. Of course, that doesn't make sense for the dry matter percentage which should be entered as soon as it is known so Fusion can correctly calculate loads of feed being built. We'll leave the date at the current date and move to the New Value field where we'll enter 86.5%.
Now we can save this attribute . If we tested barley again in a few days and the percentage had changed, we'd repeat the process to create a brand new dry matter attribute with a new date. It's important to note that we would not go back and edit the previous attribute record—that would result in a loss of history and affect the re-printing of older reports.
You would next create initial attributes for NEM and NEG for the new commodity by repeating the process. You might also want to do the same for pricing attributes, although that can wait until you're ready to do your billing. You may be asking why you need to create dry matter, NEM, and NEG attributes for a new commodity when you just entered them as default values while creating the commodity. It's a good question! The default values are from earlier versions of Fusion and will eventually be removed. After that, Fusion will rely only on the attribute system values. Making sure you have values in both places ensures you are ready for the future.
If you are creating a number of new commodities at the same time, there is another procedure you can follow. First, create all the new commodities as explained earlier, but skip creating the associated attribute records. Then, use the Bulk Attribute Change window to set up all the attributes at once. This window can be found under the Attributes menu . It is also useful for updating pricing at the end of each month and has additional functionality which we won't explain here. Instead, we'll just concentrate on creating initial attributes for commodities.
We'll leave the Item field set to Ingredients. Then we'll choose dry matter for the Item Attribute field. Next, click the Fill Items List button and all your ingredients will be listed.
Double-click the first new value cell to change it and then just walk down the list. If you don't want to change a value, just tab past it or uncheck the Change checkbox. When you are done, check which locations are affected and enter the date the change should be recorded for. When you click Save Changes, Fusion will walk down the list and create a new attribute record for each item that has a checked Change field.
Then click the Clear List button and repeat the process for NEM and NEG attributes. And for pricing attributes if you want.
If we now look at the list the commodity attributes, we'll see the records that the Bulk Attribute Change window just created. Had we made a mistake, we could find the record here and edit it or even delete it.
If you run into any questions, don't hesitate to click the help button for documentation or reach out to us for assistance.
