Quality Audits
Quality Audits let you send configurable quality-control questionnaires to your XL controllers. Data-entry screens pop up for the operator to answer — either on demand from a menu on the controller, or automatically when something happens on the line (a piece count is reached, an order changes, a shift starts, and so on). Answers come back as production records you can review in the Quality Audit report.
This replaces Eclipse Classic's Custom Lists screen. Everything is now configured in Eclipse Pro under Settings → Quality Audits; a one-time import brings your existing Classic custom lists across.
After the import, the Custom Lists screen in Eclipse Classic is locked and shows "Custom Lists are now managed in Eclipse Pro." This is deliberate — editing (or even opening) the old screen would corrupt the lists Pro sends to the controllers. All changes are made in Pro from that point on.
How it fits together
Classic's Custom Lists coupled questions, menus, and triggers into a single per-machine tree, so the same question re-created on three machines was three unrelated questions. Pro splits the configuration into reusable pieces:
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| Question | A single question in a shared library — what to ask and what kind of answer to expect. |
| Form | A named, ordered collection of questions, presented to the operator as one audit. |
| Trigger | Fires a Form on one or more machines automatically (piece count, order change, …) with run-control options. |
| Controller Menu | A per-machine menu tree of Forms the operator can launch on demand from the controller. |
Because questions are defined once and reused, answers to the same question can finally be compared across machines, triggers, and time.
The settings page
Settings → Quality Audits has four tabs. The Deploy button in the page header sends the whole configuration to the controllers — see Saving vs. deploying below.
Questions
The shared question library. Each question has:
- Text — what the operator sees (up to 40 characters, a controller display limit).
- Answer type — Number, Text, Character, Yes/No, or Pick List.
- Numbers have a width and decimals and can carry units (from the controller's fixed list — inches, feet, seconds, percent, …), a default value, and low/high limits that the controller enforces at entry.
- Text and Character answers are free text up to a set width.
- Pick Lists offer up to 9 choices (a controller limit).
A question that is used by a Form cannot be deleted — the delete is refused with a message naming the Forms that reference it.
Forms
A Form is the questionnaire itself: a name plus an ordered list of questions from the library. The same question can appear in any number of Forms. A Form that is referenced by a Trigger or linked from a Controller Menu cannot be deleted until those references are removed.
Triggers
A Trigger binds a Form to one or more machines with a firing condition:
| Trigger | Fires when |
|---|---|
| Piece Count | Every N parts |
| Footage | Every N feet |
| Time of Day | On an interval between a start and end time |
| Order / Material / Product / Coil / Bundle / Item Change | The given thing changes (optionally delayed by N parts) |
| User Field Change | An order/item user field changes |
| Shift Change | The shift changes |
Run-control options: Prevent Run (the machine cannot run until the audit is completed), Stop After N minutes or N parts, and Allow Override (the operator may dismiss the audit). A trigger can also be qualified so it only fires when an order or item user field matches a given value.
Some trigger types need a minimum XL controller firmware version — Item Change needs 3.12, User Field Change 3.22, and Shift Change 3.57. Pro knows each machine's firmware and refuses to attach a trigger the controller can't honor.
Controller Menu
Each machine gets a menu tree the operator navigates on the controller. Items point at Forms; folders group items into sub-menus; use the indent/outdent buttons to move rows into and out of folders.
The machine's triggered forms appear in this tree automatically (marked with a bolt icon), so you decide where they sit in the controller's menu — many sites tuck them into a folder to keep the top level tidy. Placement only affects the menu; when a triggered audit fires is controlled entirely by its trigger. Trigger rows can't be deleted here — delete the trigger itself on the Triggers tab.
Rows with a folder icon are folders — they hold nested items and don't link a Form themselves. Menus imported from Classic keep their nesting and show up as the same tree here.
Importing from Classic
The one-time import lives behind the Import from Classic button and is a preview-then-commit flow:
- Preview — Pro reads every custom list from Classic and catalogs them: name, machines, and how many data-entry questions each contains. Every list is shown, whether or not its QC List flag is set — real audit content often lives on unflagged lists. Lists that contain questions are selected by default; you choose which to import.
- Review what the selected lists become: the questions (duplicates are merged into one shared question), the Forms, the Triggers, and each machine's menu tree. Common Classic layouts are understood — Entry Complete rows (Classic's audit-completion marker) are recognized and re-created automatically on deploy rather than imported as questions, and a question sitting directly in a menu becomes a single-question Form.
- Commit — the configuration is saved into Pro. If anything changed in Classic between preview and commit, the commit is refused and you preview again.
After the commit, the Custom Lists screen in Classic locks itself and shows the "managed in Eclipse Pro" message. Your first Deploy after the import replaces the imported Classic lists on the controllers with Pro's version of the same configuration — until then, the controllers keep running the lists they already have. Classic lists you chose not to import are left alone.
An XL controller holds one custom list at a time, so a machine's entire audit configuration (menu plus all triggered forms) travels together. If a Classic custom list you did not import still claims a machine you're deploying to, the deploy is refused with a message naming the list — import it or remove the machine from it first.
Saving vs. deploying
Saving changes in the four tabs never touches the controllers. Changes accumulate in Pro until you press Deploy in the page header:
- An Undeployed changes indicator appears whenever the saved configuration is newer than the last deploy.
- Deploy validates everything (firmware gates, controller limits) and sends each affected machine its complete, merged list. Warnings and errors are reported per machine.
- Every deployed Form ends with an Entry Complete item, matching the Classic convention: selecting it finishes the audit, carries the previous value forward for any unanswered questions, and marks the audit complete in reporting.
- Deploying an unchanged configuration is harmless — controllers whose list content didn't change are not disturbed.
If a controller can't accept the send at that moment (for example, an operator is in the middle of answering an audit), delivery is retried automatically every communication cycle until the controller confirms it — you don't need to redeploy. (Automatic retry requires the updated Eclipse Classic components that ship alongside this feature; without them, delivery still works but a locked controller needs a manual redeploy.)
Reviewing results
Operator answers come back as quality records and appear in the Quality Audit report. Each entry shows the question, the recorded answer, and links back to the Form that produced it, so you can jump straight from a result to the configuration behind it. Because questions are shared, the same question keeps a stable identity across machines and triggers — the foundation for cross-machine analysis of audit answers.
FAQ
Do I have to import before I can use Quality Audits? Only if the site has existing Classic custom lists with questions in them — the deploy insists on the import first so nothing on the controllers is silently overwritten. A site that never used Custom Lists can start fresh in Pro immediately.
Can I still edit lists in Eclipse Classic? No. After the import (or the first Pro deploy), the Classic screen refuses to open. This protects the Pro-managed lists — the old editor would corrupt them just by opening.
What happens to answers recorded before the migration? They're still there. Records created after the migration additionally carry the durable question identity, which future reporting uses to group the same question across contexts.
Why does a trigger refuse certain machines? The machine's controller firmware is older than the trigger type requires. The message names the machines; the alternatives are a different trigger type or a firmware update.
How big can a machine's configuration get? Controller limits apply: at most 999 rows and 6 menu levels per machine's merged list, 9 choices per pick list. The deploy checks all of these and tells you exactly what to trim if a machine exceeds them.