What is Material Manager?

As one of the FactoryTalk Batch components, Material Manager provides plant-level material management and tracking that is tied to corporate material management systems. Material Manager manages and tracks the use of materials by material type, lot, and sublot. It manages and tracks vessels, containers and pallets, as well as permanent and transient storage. It also provides automatic support for bulk containers with multiple lots either as composites or plug flow separated.

Material Manager adds material definitions to the recipes, significantly reducing the number of recipes needed for flexible storage facilities. Material consumption, production, and association of materials to containers and vessels are automatically logged, providing complete information for forward and backward material tracking within and across process cells.

The material recipes, called material-based recipes, allow you to define recipes in terms of materials used, not just by plant equipment. A material-based recipe uses material-enabled phases, which are configured in the Equipment Editor and stored in the area model. Material-enabled phases support the specification of a material as a means to find appropriate equipment and bind to that equipment in a control recipe.

The following figure is a conceptual diagram of the elements of the material-based recipe function and illustrates the relationships among the functional components.