Creating Nutritional (Diet) Plans

Summary

Nutritional Plans are a way to assign food diets to individual animals, exhibits or even specific groups of animals (called a Mixed Group). The information that is entered in the Nutritional Plan is meant to represent each animal's target diet (or food base) for a given day, and does not necessarily match what is actually fed. The actual food amount fed each day is recorded in the Session Record.

---

To configure your facility's Nutritional Plans follow these steps:

1. Go to the Animal Menu in your Facility.
2. Click on "Nutritional Plans" from within the Animal menu from the Navigator panel.

2. Starting from the left and moving to the right, use the drop-down menus to filter the Nutritional Plan to a specific individual, collection or mixed group.  These filters include:
1. Area/Exhibit: select the area/exhibit (tank/habitat) of the individual or group you are creating a Nutritional Plan for.
2. Type:  select whether you are creating a plan for an Individual, Collection or a Mixed Group
3. Name: select the name of the Individual, Collection or Mixed Group (this list will be filtered depending on your selections in a and b above). 
3. Click the "Add New" button.

NOTE:  If you are Editing or Deleting an existing food assignment that has already been entered into the system, select the specific food from the list that appears following Step #3 and click on the "View/Edit Selected" button to modify, or the "Delete" button to remove that food type. 

TIP: If you make a change to a food item for a particular day, you can use the Nutritional Plan Helper to copy that day's plan to any other days of the week (or all days of the week).  This will save you time if a change you make to one day also applies to other days of the week.

4. Select a food type by clicking on the magnifying glass icon  and then clicking on the "Select" button by the required food type.
   
   
   NOTE:  Only food lots that have been received in the system will show up for selection in this step.  See our Knowledge Base article "Food Inventory Tools - Summary" for more information.
5. Enter the quantity of that food type to be fed and select the unit of weight required for that food type.
6. If you prefer to record the number of units of a particular food item (pieces) instead of weight, the system can be configured to do so.  You must first go to the Master Food Inventory tool and add an estimated number of pieces per unit of weight (lbs or kg) to use this feature.  
7. If configured, you can select a specific Prep Code, Container code and/or Feed Method code to be associated with this specific Nutritional Plan. This is optional.  For more information on configuring these codes, click on the corresponding hyperlinks above.
8. Enter a target time that the selected food should be administered.
   

   TIP:  This time is only a guideline and does not influence when the actual session/feed times are recorded.  Times can also be used to simply list food types in a preferred order.  
9. Click on the day(s) of the week that food type is fed.
10. Click the Apply button when complete.