In all types of daily data entry, there are values that change often, like flow meters, hour meters, and daily chemical tank levels. Then there are some values that rarely change, such as bulk tank levels and chemical inventories. Waterly makes entering those daily values that don't often change easier for consistent data practices.
Current Method - Sparkline
The current method of entering the same value as yesterday is to either page back a day or use the sparkline trend to see what the last value was.
New Method – Copy Previous Value
This option will allow the operator to copy the last value entered, essentially copying the last value forward automatically. This will assist the operator to ensure consistent data entry for chemical inventories, bulk tank levels and other similar metrics. This function will look back up to 8 days to the last value and bring the last entry forward to today.
For instance, a bulk tank was read on Monday and was not read the rest of the week until Friday. With the Copy Previous Value function, the operator can tap the icon, review the Monday value, and save that value to Friday if they agree that it is accurate for today. Please note: This function will not “fill in” the empty days in between these readings. In the example, Monday would have data, Tuesday-Thursday would be empty, and Friday would copy Monday’s value forward.
Configuring Copy Previous Value
Accessing this function is available to anyone with supervisory permissions in Waterly. Enter edit mode by clicking on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner of the screen and toggle on Edit Mode. Navigate to the appropriate metric that you want to enable Copy Previous Value and click on the pencil icon. This will open the Metric Editor panel. Check the box labeled “Enable Copy Previous Values.” Then click save at the bottom of the metric editor panel.
Note: This function is limited to specific, appropriate units of measure (UOM), i.e. feet, inches, gallons and the like. This function will be greyed out if the UOM is not allowed to be copied forward. For a list of the UOM that are not allowed to be copied forward, please click here to access the interpolation article (Data Interpolation). Also, a metric selected for either a calculation or interpolation cannot enable copy previous value.
Using the Copy Previous Value function
The daily use of this function is very intuitive and simple with just a few guidelines. Once the function is enabled a new icon will display in the metric. If a previous value is available to copy forward in the previous 8 days, the icon will display as bold. In addition, the sparkline will display a value within the last 8 days.
Click the icon and a message will display the previous value to be copied forward, it will be entered in the metric, and the sparkline will display today’s value.
If there is no value in the previous 8 days to copy forward, the icon will be disabled (greyed out)
Conclusion
Copy Previous Value will make consistent data entry even easier for those values that do not experience daily changes. Utilizing this function provides a more robust dataset while respecting the need for onsite confirmation of data collection.