Search for Cross References

Cross References are additional codes and names which can be given to your products so that products you sample or sell have a specific name and code for each customer and so your customers do not know your internal codes and names.

You can use ‘Manage Cross References’ to search for items supplied to specified customers, supplied within a date range and other searches. This is generally useful, as it’s a quick way to see history for items associated with customers.

In an established system, the cross reference history can be a useful source of data to use in several other ways. For example:

1. If a customer requests e.g. an updated Specification for all products sold in the last year, then searching with cross references can get you the list which you can easily transfer to the print documents function.
2. Sometimes a customer wants to know how many products they have been sent containing a specific type of hazard, or problem ingredients, or which are compliant to their own rules. Then cross references found can be easily transferred using Baskets, in order to perform other functions.

You search for cross reference in ‘Manage Cross References’. There are several search criteria which can be used and combined.

Example Search – Find all products sampled to a customer between two dates and use the results

Pre-requisite: last sample date must be available in Formpak. Last sample dates are available if samples are supplied using Formpak, or if last sample date is imported to Formpak.

In this search, we have selected to search for cross references where the last sample date is between 18th May 2019 and 2020; for company Big Customer HQ, and also selected to ‘Include Belonging Parties’.

In the results above, we see entries for both Big Customer HQ and Big Customer UK – this is because we selected to ‘Include Belonging Parties’.

Examples of how to use search for Cross Reference results:

1. Use the results to supply up to date documents to the customer

   Use ‘Add to Basket’ option and add the cross references to the basket

   

   Click on the basket (Basket 1 above), and select View to open the basket. Then select ‘Print Documents & Labels’, highlighted below.

   

   Select the items for which you want to print documents

   

   Proceed to print documents in the usual way.

   

2. Use the results to interrogate products for use of specific types of hazard or ingredients or which are compliant to customer rules

   Add the items to the basket, as shown in example 1.

   Go to Find Matching Items and use ‘Add from Basket’ to add the items into Find Matching Items

   

   This adds the items, so you can perform further searches or prepare reports.

   a) For example you can search for which items are classified with an aspiration hazard (property AH 1) or eye damage category 1 hazard (property EDI 1) under GHS:

   

   The search results show all five, which means all five are classified with either of these hazards:

   

   To see further details, we can ‘Print’ and report the details for the interesting areas, by adding the relevant properties to the ‘Properties’ tab to customize the columns shown in the printed report:

   
   

   The printed output shows which items have the properties:

   

   b) Another example, you can use Find Matching Items to check if any items contain specified ingredients

   

   c) A third example, you can use Find Matching Items to check if the items comply to the customer rules, using ‘Suitability Check’.

   

   This is a simple check, and the results show all items are compliant to the customer rules by showing a tick:

   

   Note; Additional information about suitability is available.

3. Report the cross references for further review

   In Find Matching Items you can ‘search’ for the items of interest and report many types of information about them. It can be useful to report to excel so you can sort and filter later, especially if you have a large number of results.

   Add the items to the basket, as shown in example 1. Without entering any other criteria, press ‘Search’ and then ‘Print’.

   In the Customize Column box, you can choose to display almost anything about the items. For example, you could report additional information about the creator and created date

   

   Also report sensory information and last sample date. Then print the report to an Excel format

   
   

   There are many other places you can use ‘Add from Basket’ to add cross references which are specific to a customer.