The Bulk report

A fluid model’s output does not live on the report’s opening page. It lives on the Bulk tab.

Finding it

The report opens on the trust question, and for a plant with no entities it shows a red banner with a No entities completed problem. That is correct: a fluid model is measured, not counted, so the entity tiles read zero. The output is on the Bulk tab, reached by clicking Advanced on the right of the tab row, then Bulk.

Levels over time

The first thing on the Bulk tab is a chart of every vessel’s level through the run. A straight climb is a constant difference between what comes in and what goes out. A flat top is a vessel that filled and stopped accepting. A flat line on the bottom is a vessel that passed everything straight through without ever holding a gallon.

The mass balance

Under the chart is one row per material: opening, receipts, output, losses, closing, a residual and a verdict.

Figure 1. The top of the Bulk tab: levels over time, the mass balance, and the Tanks table.

Check this row first, every time. Opening plus receipts, less output and losses, equals closing, and the residual should be effectively zero with a verdict of OK. If it is not, material has appeared or vanished somewhere, and no other number on the page can be trusted until that is explained.

The Tanks table

One row per vessel, with the columns that answer whether each is the right size: capacity, received, delivered, level at end, average level (which is time weighted), the share of the run spent full, the share spent at the heel, and turnovers, which is delivered divided by working volume. A vessel that turns over many times a shift is a buffer; one that turns over about once is storage.

The Transfer Lines table

One row per pipe, and this is usually where the answer is.

Figure 2. The Transfer Lines table. The pipe at 100 percent of nameplate is the constraint.

Each pipe’s time is split across six buckets that always add up to the length of the run: Running, Off-shift, Down, Closed, Starved and Blocked. Down outranks the rest, because a broken pump is broken whatever its tanks are doing. Starved is the source failing to keep the pipe fed at its rated speed; Blocked is the destination failing to take what the pipe offers.

Reading it

A pipe can read Starved for the whole run and still have moved a great deal. Starved means it never reached its rated speed, not that nothing moved. To find the constraint, look down the percent of nameplate column: the pipe at 100 percent while every other pipe runs below its own rating is the one that sets the pace for the whole plant.

To see which element stopped the others, open the Bottlenecks tab: on a fluid or bulk run it adds a table of who is at fault, described in Report Tabs.

The sections below Transfer Lines

Under the Transfer Lines table, the tab carries one section for each kind of element the model uses. A section appears only when the model has something to report in it, so a plant with no skids has no Skids section.

Section	What it shows
Unit Operations	One row for each machine: what it drew, delivered and lost, its yield, what stopped it and which tank to fix, and the same six time buckets as a pipe.
Skids	One row for each frame that carries machines in order: its Sections, the rate it achieved, and the Binding Section that held it back, with its Share of Run.
Dumpers	Dumps, Dumped, Turned Away, Un-dumpable (min) and Per Dump.
Discharges	Batches, Discharged, Per Batch and how often a request was Refused.
Clean Groups	The wash bill: Cleans, Washing (min), Per Wash, Wind-down (min), Resource Wait (min) and Cost.
Setup Groups	The same for changeovers, so you can tell whether the wash or the changeover costs more.
Fillers	Containers, Drawn, Starved %, Blocked %, changeovers, Availability, Performance, Quality, OEE and the six time buckets.
Containers by Format	A row for each filler and each container format it ran, with the containers finished in that format.
Run Table	The plan against what was made, for each run table.
Money	Costs and revenue, when the model prices anything.

The Run Table section opens with a headline for each table: Planned, Made, and “Plan met” or how many rows are short. Then come the two planning lines, which begin “Milk: received” and “Tanks:”, a block for each product with its plan, what was made and packed and why it ran short, an Hours, per day table for each element that reads the plan, and one row for each row of the plan. See Run Tables.

The Money section holds By Material, what was received and sold, what it cost and earned, and the Shrink Cost of what was lost; By Element, what each element cost; Shrink by Site, where material was lost; Constraint Cost, what each hold-up cost; Totals; and How these were priced, the pricing rules behind each line.

Hover a column heading on any table to see what it measures.

The shrink the plan expects

Not every figure here was measured. Expected shrink, the last row of the Definitions card, is the percent of milk you expect to lose between the receiving bay and the case: a planning figure, set in Materials and the Definitions panel. On a plan with a Run Table, the milk line that begins “Milk: received” starts from it. What was received, less the shrink, less what leaves as a by-product, is what there is to plan against. The money figures on this tab measure the real loss separately.