New Portal Navigation
RoastPATH continues to add new features. With that comes the need for users to find those new features quickly and intuitively. In this release, we are changing the way our users navigate the RoastPATH Portal. The top navigation bar has moved to the left side of the screen. This gives us more room for new features and should make it quicker to get to the places you want to go. If you are a user within multiple roasteries, you can still switch the context of which roastery you are in using the drop-down menu in the top right corner. This menu also contains less frequently accessed places such as user and roastery preferences/settings, the help pages, and a link for downloading the RoastPATH App.
Roast Plan
The highlight of this release is the introduction of roast planning. You may now plan your batches for the day or week in advance and record those plans in RoastPATH. Select your coffee and batch size to create a task in your Roast Plan. You may also optionally assign that task to a user and machine, as well as set a due date. There is a text field to enter a project key. This could be an order number, email address, or any other note such as “Farmers Market” to indicate why you are roasting this batch of coffee. All of these fields can be used to filter your task for easy organizing. Each task includes the ability to specify which Profile or Path you wish to use as a roast reference underlay. When loading a task in the RoastPATH App, the specified Profile or Path will be automatically loaded into the roasting screen, and the specified coffee and batch size will be pre-entered into the save dialog. NOTE: Roast Plan features are available in the RoastPATH App version 2.5 and above.
The Roast Plan will update with in-progress and complete status icons as the RoastPATH App completes each task. The Roast Plan is intended to be a temporary to-do list. At the end of the day or week, review your task list, select all the tasks you have completed, and delete them once you are done reviewing your work. Tasks will not be deleted automatically. Once you have completed your review, you can clean up your list for the next round or roasting.
You may bulk assign a machine, user, due date, and project key to multiple tasks at once. Need to roast multiple batches of the exact same coffee? Use the duplicate feature to quickly fill out your tasks for the day.
In the RoastPATH App 2.5 and above, the save dialog will now prompt you to mark the current task complete and ask if you would like to start the next task in your Roast Plan. Selecting this option will immediately load the next task into the roast screen and mark that task as “in progress”.
Roast Plan is only the start of helping you manage your production roastery. The next release of the RoastPATH Portal will introduce the ability to import and export your Roast Plan. Do you already have an application, tool, or spreadsheet you use to manage what you are roasting for the week? Our next release will create the option to upload that list of batches to RoastPATH to create your Roast Plan. More information to come.
More and Better Support for Other Manufacturers
RoastPATH App version 2.5 adds support for roasters with Phidget connectors and Type J, T, and S thermocouples. Previously only Type K thermocouples were supported. Please contact RoastPATH support for help in setting up the correct configuration for your machine.
RoastPATH now has improved support for machines that require manual entry for Fuel, Fan, and Drum (FFD) values. Users may now specify the range of each FFD setting. For example, does your machine have a dial that goes from 0 – 10 for your Fan? The display settings now allow you to specify a maximum of 10 for the fan value in the chart. The same is true of Fuel and Drum speed. Set the chart maximum for each manual setting to optimize the charts in your recordings. The same maximum values will be applied to the entry field to ensure you don’t accidentally enter a value that is higher than the maximum value. Finally, we have closed a long-standing bug with manual entries and charting. It can be difficult to manually record a fuel change immediately after making the adjustment. Now, if you enter a fuel adjustment for 30 seconds in the past, or edit the time of a previously entered value, the chart will recalculate so the lines accurately reflect the times in the notebook. All FFD manual notes will be correctly updated on the chart.
Coffee Version History
If your roastery has a Coffee called “Morning Blend,” there is a good chance the components of that coffee have changed over the years. Every time you modify the components of a coffee, this creates a new version. The new RoastPATH Portal release will let you review the history of your coffee versions, showing which greens were in the coffee for each version and in what percentage. This can be handy for that holiday blend, letting you look back and see what you did in previous years.
Coffee Version History also becomes increasingly important as we consider production planning. There will be a day when you run out of one green and need to substitute in a new one. This changes the coffee version. On a day when half your roasts use the old coffee version and the other half use the new one, having the ability to review the current and previous version components is critical. Knowing if a roast includes the old or new components of a blend will also be critical in the future when inventory integration is added to RoastPATH.
Showing old versions uncovered a bug that occurred many years ago. If you have been a long-time RoastPATH user, you may find that you have multiple coffee versions for V1. If you find yourself in that situation, the Portal will show you an option to fix that bug and renumber your coffee versions correctly, using the version creation date.
New List Features
Many of the lists on the RoastPATH Portal received some enhancements with this release. Both the Profiles list for your roastery and the Public Profile Library list include the ability to change the columns in the list view. Sometimes you care who roasted the profile and on what machine, other times you may be looking for a profile by a country of origin and processing method, or perhaps you want to review the percentage of time profiles were in the development phase. The new list views allow you to choose what information you want to see in the list. New filtering improvements were added to a few lists as well.
