EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Ansur answers !!!

I've been recently tasked with moving our PM/Performance testing protocols to Ansur,I would like to speak to someone on the phone(i'll pay the dues)about the difference between the Metron test template and the final printed report.
Fluke Italy "SLT" cant resolve the query and Fluke.com are not the fastest responders.
Would an Ansur guru please PM me with contact details,your next pizza in Rome is on me......

Well, I can't pretend to compete with Fluke Tech Support, but as you may recall Malcolm, I have done some digging into Ansur (and certain other interfaces).

But you're asking about the "difference between the Metron test template and the final printed report".

I'm not clear about what it is you're trying to do there, except to say that the .mtt (.mts, .mtr) files are basically XML in style ... and therefore can be manipulated outside of Ansur if you're so inclined.

Regarding the "printed report(s)" ... do you mean those individually printed from Ansur? As I only have demo version(s) of Ansur available to me (which do not permit reports to be printed), I can't say with certainty what underlying format they use.* Do you know?

But it looks like Ansur only lets you print from .mtr (results) files.

What is it exactly that you're trying to do ... pull data from Ansur test templates (.mtt files)?

* But I've noticed that version 3.0 of Ansur lets you "Export to PDF".

Extract from the Ansur readme file dated 26-Feb-15:-


Could this be the ... answer?

Or at least another "clue"!

I've had a play with the limited set-up I have here, Malcolm ... and have to say that "it always works for me" (up until the Print Preview stage, that is).

Do your Print Previews and actual printouts match OK?

No doubt you have already tried all this, but I have found that fiddling about with the Report Settings (File | Edit Report Settings) does impact on the Print Preview (as you might expect).

These settings worked OK for me:-


Lastly, the .mtr file won't automatically inherit any changes you may have made in the .mtt file it uses. Rather you have to use Edit | Add Template to associate the .mtr with your revised .mtt template ... thereby *losing the previous results! You then have to re-run the test (F9 etc.) in order to populate the Result Data tab. After completing the test (bogus test?) your next Print Preview will show Test Results containing your revised .mtt narrative.

Sorry if I'm teaching anyone to suck eggs here ... but (as I say) it works for me.

Meanwhile, does anyone else out there have any pointers (or a nice "crib sheet") about all this?

As an aside I'm more interested myself in the possibility of extracting (parsing?) data from those .mtr files for use in a database or what-have-you ... but have yet to gain any real success with that one.

* Which is why it's better to attach any revised .mtt (template) to the .mts (test sequence) file before calling it into Ansur ... and then conducting the test:- .mtt -> .mts -> .mtr.

HTML.

Geoff,Well done !!

Maybe someone from TBS UK could step in with a few pointers...

It seems to me that developing a decent set of test templates in Ansur would be (is) by no means a trivial undertaking.

Especially if anyone wanted to branch out beyond their own hospital(s) into the Wider World (as it were) and refer those templates to the equipment to be tested (whether "generic" or - more work still - actual manufacturers and models etc.).

There again, you would need to also accommodate the various options of "plug-ins" needed for the ever-growing range of Fluke test kit that may be used with Ansur. That is, how would you know (apart from an "educated guess") which test kit anyone else was using (or planning to use)?

Perhaps all this could explain why (if) folk aren't too keen on sharing the fruits of their labours!

Maybe what we need is an Ansur Users Club!

Dears Ansur users,
I am happy to few of You on EBME, in Europe not in US. I would vote to establish Ansur diccusion corner on this EBME forum.
I become user of Ansur since September 2015. During two months of learning I got impression that Ansur is product far from BioTek OTIS. The flexibility of procedure adaptation we used in OTIS is now hard to find in Ansur. This is sad. And very hard to broke the legacy of gained expeerience using OTIS.
But the Ansur have other side of work-orders, and compatibility with CMMS systems. This is side, which we in the hospital did not uitilized during OTIS era. Therefore I see progress.
Now I would open question in adapting Ansur to local needs:
1. Language issues. I our case Lithuanian. I offered Fluke to translate procedure and results LNG files and asked to help. But the answer was "NO: this requires firmware update on devices we use". Now I did translation on my own without national characters which are in ISO-8859-4 - Latin 4 standardized 8bit character sets. Ansur is limited to ISO-8859-4.
If you have any progress in this direction? Please respond.

Sincerely Yours,
Rytis

It's good to see you on here Rytis.

Yes ... OTIS versus Ansur - is that really progress? ...

Unfortunately this sort of thing is not unknown when small pioneering companies get swallowed up by the Big Boys!

But there are two different "back stories" there, of course; viz Bio-Tek, and Metron.

Which CMMS do you use (that's compatible with Ansur) by the way?

And which Ansur version are you using (and on top of which flavour of Windows)?

OK ... the famous LNG files. As you know these are simply ASCII text files where label strings can be edited and substituted for another. But (I'm guessing here) that Ansur itself will only be able to display characters within whichever character set it uses. Have you tried other font character sets?

I don't have Ansur here just now, so can't check myself; but what I would try is to enter some label changes in a couple of LNG files using a font character set that includes the characters you want, save (using, for example, MS Notepad) with Unicode encoding ... and see what Ansur displays. No doubt you have already tried this.

Meanwhile, I suspect that Fluke have misunderstood your requirements - which I presume to be that you wish to customize the Ansur software to show Lithuanian wording in the menus, labels and button captions etc. ... as well as when entering notes in the text editors - am I on the right track here?

There's no "firmware" involved there - they must have thought you wanted Fluke test equipment to display Lithuanian legends (menus etc.) (... and why not)!

Lastly, in MS Notepad terms, which script does your language require ... am I correct in assuming "Baltic"?

For what it's worth, I've just checked out Ansur 3.0.0 and notice that a lot more language options (than hitherto) are available under menu option Tools -> Options -> Language (tab).

Even Chinese is there (but not Lithuanian, unfortunately).

So can you not simply edit one of those at the LNG files(s) - the Portuguese, Spanish or Turkish (or whatever)?

By the way, I tried adding a couple of dummy LNG files in the appropriate directory folder, but they did not appear at the "User interface language" selection panel at the "Language" tab within Ansur - hence my suggestion to edit an option that does appear there.