Product Specification Templates
A number of improvements have been made to the default document template that agile:NPDtech uses to generate product specifications;
- Data is now in two columns to make better use of space on the page and reduce the page count
- Users can add different packaging options, each with a number of fields. For example, primary packaging may be a carton of a certain weight and size, secondary may be a larger box and tertiary may be a pallet. Or multiple primary packaging options can be used, they can even have different shelf lives if necessary
(COMING SOON: the ability to add packaging images)
- A footer includes product code, version and page number, in ‘page X of Y’ format. That should make it easy to tell if pages from different versions have been accidentally mixed, or any pages left out
Improved Recipe Costings
Several improvements have also been made to Recipe Costings;
- Packaging costs can now be added to recipe costings
- The system will display the total cost and cost per kg in the main product screen
- If any ingredients are missing costs, they will be highlighted in the product screen
New Ingredients Declaration Style
In the past we had two ingredients declaration styles – basic and aggregated, now we’ve added a third, the ‘exploded’ style.
- The basic style lists every top level ingredient.
However, remember that an ingredient can itself be a made internally, with a recipe itself
- The aggregated style, is useful in this situation. It takes all ingredients in sub-recipes (as many levels down as necessary) and calculates their percentages in the final product. Furthermore, if two different ingredients have the same ‘name for ingredients dec’, their percentages will be added together. E.g. ‘fine salt’ and ‘sea salt’ could be lumped together as ‘salt’ in the final ingredients declaration
- The exploded style ingredient declaration comes in handy when customers want the ability to show full sub-recipes under each main ingredient e.g. where packaged meals such as ‘lamb rogan josh with rice’ are being made, and there’s one recipe for the rice and one for the lamb.
If you’ve any suggestions for naming these styles better, please let us know.
Regardless of the style, customers can;
- choose a minimum level to declare percentages over
- manually edit generated ingredient declarations
When we set up your account, you can tell us which style(s) you’d like to support and we can enable those only, to avoid incorrect styles for your products.