About Meters and Meter Groups

You can create meters and meter groups in the Meters application and then within the Item Master (SP) application, associate a meter to an item or a meter group to a rotating item. Meters can be of three types: continuous (gallons to date, running time), gauge (a temperature reading), and characteristic (a color, a vibration level).

Meters

When you associate a continuous meter to an item and then issue the item to a work order, asset, or location, the associated asset or location record is updated with the quantity that was issued and decreases the storeroom balance of that item. (This happens only when the meter on the item matches the meter on the asset or location.)

For example, you may have FUEL defined as a meter and GASOLINE as an item. Within Item Master, you can associate the meter FUEL to the item GASOLINE. When you issue fuel for an asset, such as a truck, the balance of the fuel in the storeroom is decreased by the amount issued, and in the Assets (SP) application on the Meters tab, you can see that the amount of fuel issued to the truck increases by the issued amount. This allows you to track fuel consumption for that asset.

Meter Groups

A meter group is a set of meters that you can apply to an asset record. In the case of a rotating item, any meter group that is associated with the rotating item is applied to any assets that are created for that item.

For example, a pump is a rotating item. On a pump, you might track meters such as inlet pressure, outlet pressure, and vibrations. These meters are common to all pumps. Instead of having to add these meters to each asset record created for this rotating item, you can instead create a meter group with this collection of pump-related meters and associate it with the rotating item. Each time you create an asset record for the pump, the meter group and its meters are associated with the asset record so that you do not have to do so manually.

Note: For more information about meters and meter groups, see the online help for those applications.