Products at Uncountable serve two main purposes:

1. To categorize an Experiment (e.g., slurries, resins, adhesives). Experiments categorized as Products are designed to be used as compounded experiments in downstream processes, and Product assignments help facilitate collaboration throughout these processes. 
2. To map an Experiment to an Ingredient (e.g., commercial resin XYZ, or BOM Part Number XYZ). In this case Experiments are designated as lots (batches) of Ingredients. If commercial resin XYZ is used in another Experiment, any Experiment assigned to the Product commercial resin XYZ can now be selected as a lot of commercial resin XYZ.

How Products Work

Products map to a Project folder created in Uncountable. When an Experiment is assigned to a Product, a linked copy of that Experiment will automatically be added into the Project folder associated with that Product. This means that regardless of which Project the experiment is created within, a repository of all Experiments associated with the Product will live in a central location for future analysis, visualization, and querying. 

What Products Look Like

In the list of Experiments in a Project Dashboard, a Product assignment is designated similarly to a normal Experiment Tag, to the right of the name. Product Tags can be differentiated by the additional “stacked cubes” icon.

On the Recipe or Measurements view of an Experiment, the Product assignment will appear below the Experiment name, similar to an Experiment Tag.

How to Assign a Product (Without a Template)

Manual Product assignment is done by selecting the “stacked cubes” icon below the experiment name on the Recipes view of your Experiment. Selecting this icon will display a dropdown list, where you may select the Product you would like to associate with the Experiment. Note that while this manual approach is always available, at Uncountable we recommend creating Product assignments via more advanced templatization (described in the following sections).

Products for Experiment Categorization

Products may be used to categorize Experiments and map Experiment relationships. In the screenshot below, on the left side Binder Pre-mix Experiments feed into Slurry Experiments, and on the right side, Resin Experiments are used as components in both Compounding Experiments and Injection Molding Experiments.

Creating a New Product (Experiment Categorization)

1. Create a Project folder for your Product (Resin).

2. On the Projects page, click the settings cog in the top-right and select View Products.

3. Select ‘+ Add Product’, select the Project folder name, and select Confirm.

4. In this example, Resins are used as Ingredients in Compounds (another Product), so you may select ‘+ Add Relationship’ to select the source Product (Resin) and target Product (Compounds).

5. After creating this relationship, you will see a visual connection depicted, allowing you to more easily use Resins in Compounds in the future.

Templatizing Product Assignments for Experiment Categorization

At Uncountable we recommend templatizing Product assignment through Workflows. To create a templated Product Workflow start by:

1. Creating a new Workflow. Create all the Steps necessary (see Experiment Workflows & Variants for more instructions on Workflow creation). Under the “List” view, select the desired Default Product (e.g., Resin).

2. After creating this relationship, any new Experiment created with this Workflow will be automatically categorized as a Resin Product, with the associated Product Tag automatically assigned.
3. Because there are (a) workflows associated with the Products Compounds and Injection Molding, and (b) product relationships between Resins, Compounds, and Injection Molding, an additional button will appear on the Recipe view of your Resin experiments, allowing you to directly use the experiment as a component ingredient in either Compounding or Injection Molding Experiments, thus making it easier to create these new downstream Product experiments.

Products for Ingredient Mapping

Creating a New Product (Ingredient Mapping)

Create a Product folder for your ingredient (e.g., Resin 1001) (see previous section). On the Projects page, click the settings cog and select View Products, add a Product and map the Project folder (Resin 1001) to the Ingredient (Resin 1001).

Templatizing Product Assignments (Ingredient Mapping)

At Uncountable, we recommend templatizing product assignment through workflow variants whenever possible, to reduce the number of steps needed to create the desired Experiment-to-Product associations.

1. To create a templated Product Workflow Variant, begin by creating a Workflow to describe the category of the Products that you will be assigning. For example, if you are creating commercial resins, create a Commercial Resins Workflow; if you are creating media, create a Batch Media Workflow.

2. Navigate to the Variants tab and create a Variant for each Product. You can either assign an already existing Experiment as a template Experiment for each Variant, or a new Experiment will be created upon creating each Variant.

3. Make sure that each template Experiment you manually assign each Experiment to the corresponding Product, and that the Experiments contain the desired standard Inputs (Ingredients and/or Process Parameters).

4. Once you’ve configured the template Experiments and associated them to the desired Product for each Workflow Variant, you may navigate back to the Projects page. Select the View Products option for the cog icon in the top-right, and make sure that each Product has the “Inherit Membership on Copy” option checked. This setting will ensure that experiments created from one of these Workflow Variants will be automatically assigned to the corresponding Product (by in effect copying from the template Recipe associated with the Workflow Variant).

5. When a new Experiment is created from a Workflow Variant, 1) Recipe details will automatically populate based on the template Experiment, and 2) the Experiment will be automatically assigned as the corresponding Product.