Runs and cycle counts
The cycle count on a machine's row is not an estimate. It is the number of runs that finished in that machine, and behind every one of them is a record naming the order, the staff at either end, and the clock.
What a run holds
A run opens the moment an order is loaded into a machine and closes when it comes out. Open, it holds the machine, the order, the outlet, the staff member who loaded it and the time they did it. Closed, it also holds the time it ended, the staff member who ended it, and what ended it.
While it is open it is what the wash house floor reads from: the elapsed clock on a busy card and the name underneath both come from the run rather than from the machine. A machine can hold one open run at a time, which is the entire reason it can hold one order at a time. See The live floor.
When the count moves
Closing a run is what raises a machine's lifetime total, and not every close does it.
| How the load ended | The machine's cycles |
|---|---|
| Somebody unloaded it | Up one |
| The order moved to a status that takes no machine | Up one |
| The order moved out of a washer and into a dryer | The washer's count goes up one |
| The order was moved to another machine of the same kind | Unchanged |
That last row is a reassignment — the drum was faulty, or you needed the bigger one — and nothing finished in the first machine, so nothing is counted for it. Unloading, and what it keeps sets out the same rules from the order's side.
The lifetime total only ever goes up. There is no field for it on the add or edit form, nothing in the dashboard resets it, and it stays with the machine through maintenance and through decommissioning. The Machines screen adds every machine's total together into one all-time figure for the outlet.
Whose work it was
A run is one of the few things Wash Junkie records against a machine rather than an order, which is what makes it the honest record of floor work. It carries two names — who loaded and who ended — and a staff member's activity trail lists the two ends separately, so somebody who loaded Washer 1 and came back an hour later to empty it appears twice, correctly.
The same records feed two reports. Machine efficiency gives you, per machine and over the window you choose, the cycles run, the average length of a cycle in minutes, the hours the machine was genuinely occupied, and how many orders passed through it. Staff performance counts machine loads by person. Machine efficiency keeps reassignments out of its cycle counts, the same way the lifetime total does, and both reports leave out runs belonging to an order you later took off the books.