Frequently asked questions about weighing and dispensing software

No. GMP requires evidence, not digitisation. Paper is permitted but slow to review, error-prone for container IDs and useless for trending. Digital pays off once an inspector asks about trends, deviations or a specific container lot.

Production order and batch, BOM position and target, material and container/lot ID, tare and net, actual quantity and deviation, scale, operator, date and time, check result, release or second-person check, and the reason for any deviation. Plus proof of charging into the process vessel. The 12-point checklist is on the "Dispensing under GMP" page.

Your manufacturing instruction defines them – APIs tighter than excipients. What matters is that the limit is technically enforced, not merely displayed. d-dispensing defaults to 98–102 % for position closure and at most 104 % of remaining per single weighing, with warnings at 50 % and 95 %.

Your risk assessment decides. GMP requires the dispensed quantity to be checked and the check recorded – by a second person or a validated automatic control. Many plants combine both.

An audit trail for GMP-relevant electronic data (changes and deletions with reason), access control, backup, and risk-based validation of the system by the operator. ALCOA+ describes what the record must look like.

Cosmetics: ISO 22716 requires production records and traceability, not an Annex 11-style audit trail – customer audits increasingly expect one. Detergents: no formal GMP duties, but CLP labelling and hazard information at the bench, plus raw material batch traceability.

A guided dispensing terminal for batch manufacturing: scan the order, check the container, weigh, finish within tolerance, store – label – book, all in the audit trail.

No. "Dispensing" here is the manufacturing step: weighing raw materials into a batch against the bill of materials of a production order. d-dispensing does not handle prescriptions or patient medication.

No. It is the bench terminal. Orders and BOMs come from the ERP, weighings go back as stock movements – today with myfactory (and xstorage) or weclapp.

No, deliberately. Recipes and BOMs stay in the ERP so there is one truth.

Yes. The BOM view tracks progress per batch.

The software counts cumulatively per position. Each weighing may deliver at most 104 % of remaining; the position closes between 98 and 102 % of target.

No. A weighing outside the band or with a wrong container cannot be booked; the refusal is logged.

The barcode is the weighing's record ID; further fields are defined in the ZPL template. The label prints only after the record is stored durably.

Confirmation that the dispensed quantity actually went into the process vessel – captured in the same record as the weighing.

Yes. GHS pictograms and signal word for the current material sit next to the live weight, sourced from your material master.

Compliance is a property of your qualified system, not of a product. d-dispensing provides the technical controls – server-side checks, hash-chained audit trail, signed updates – and the documentation for your assessment.

Every weighing, refusal, licence check and software update with trusted timestamp and reason. Entries are hash-chained; QA can verify checkpoints; export is built in.

On the site server, in addition to the browser display. A tampered client cannot bypass the limits.

The QA & compliance brief describes system boundaries, controls, failure behaviour and test evidence – hundreds of automated tests every release goes through before it ships.

No. It delivers the provable dispensing part as a record that feeds the batch record. It is not an EBR, not an MES and not a recipe management system.

Implemented and tested today: the ERPs myfactory (with xstorage as WMS) and weclapp. The integration layer is deliberately narrow and designed for more. We don't say "any ERP".

Serial industrial scales from the common manufacturers, including Mettler Toledo, Sartorius and RHEWA. Further manufacturers are easy to add in the driver layer.

Zebra network printers via ZPL.

A Windows or Linux PC with a browser and a serial port (or adapter), a barcode scanner, the scale and the printer. The station agent is a small service on that PC.

German today. The UI is fully internationalised; further languages need no changes to application logic. Light and dark mode per bench.

The weighing in progress is finished, stored durably on the bench and labelled. Once the server is reachable it is booked automatically – idempotently, no double booking.

No, deliberately. Guessing a BOM from cache is how wrong material gets dispensed. The terminal shows a clear message.

One site server per plant (none if we host it in the cloud), one station agent per scale, operation in the browser.

Manual installation today (JDK + application) for site server and station agent, documented in the administration guide. A signed Windows installer is on the roadmap.

Releases are Ed25519-signed. The station verifies signature, size and checksum before installing anything and activates the update only when no weighing is open and no record is queued – at the station's next start.

Warning three weeks ahead, then a two-week grace period, then no new orders are opened. A weighing in progress, its label or its booking is never stopped. Licence verification works offline.

Yes, if you want it. d-dispensing runs either on site, with a site server in your own network – weighings in progress then need no internet connection – or in the cloud, hosted by us, with no server of your own. The operator interface is the same in both cases; the terminal simply switches.

d-dispensing has been running in production at several manufacturers since 2015, with several million production orders processed. Reference call on request.

A terminal with a decade of real production behind it, a team you can reach directly, and influence on the roadmap – your requirements feed into ongoing development.

D-Automation GmbH, Müllheim, Germany. The team has developed and supported d-dispensing since 2015.

At /demo/ the real terminal component runs against a simulated scale – no appointment needed. For a demo on your own production orders: book via Calendly.