Ensuring Product Quality

You can use quality inspections to determine whether the stock you receive in your warehouse satisfies the quality requirements that you have put in place. A quality inspection allows you to record and document a decision, for example, OK, not OK. It also allows you to use a defect catalog to appraise the quality of an object, such as a delivery, handling unit, or product. Quality inspections in SAP EWM can be used during the inbound process and as an internal warehouse process.

You can fully handle quality inspections in SAP EWM. The decision for a quality inspection is taken by the warehouse staff and entered in the system using SAP EWM. However, you can also forward quality inspections to a (central) external system, such as SAP ERP. In this case, the decision for a quality inspection is made by a central quality management team, but the stock in SAP EWM is linked to the inspection documents and updated based on the decision in the external system.

The following figure shows an example of a process where the quality inspection step is included.

Other then counting, a quality inspection can happen also at other places, when it is paper-based. The RF or work center transactions require the products to be at the work center. But you can enter the inspection results in the desktop transaction at any other time.

You can determine the inspection frequency for a process in the Quality Inspection Engine (QIE) in different ways. For example, you can use the data from past inspection valuations to calculate the current inspection scope. To react flexibly to this data, you can modify the inspection scope dynamically by using sampling procedures and dynamic modification rules.

With respect to sample sizes and inspection probability, dynamic modification allows you to control the inspection scope for a series of inspection documents so that you can achieve a predefined quality goal with a high degree of certainty. In the QIE, you can perform dynamic modification at inspection document level.

If the inspection rule arguments specify that there is to be no dynamic modification and that the inspection procedure is to be a 100% inspection, the system uses the lot size as the sample size. However, it is often not necessary to inspect the complete inspection lot, but to inspect only a calculated sample. Then, the rest of the lot can be putaway before the decision is made.

For this, you can use a sample-drawing procedure. The sample-drawing procedure and, in some cases, the sample-drawing unit, define the quantity that must be inspected based on the specified lot size and on the number of containers. They also define how this quantity is distributed among individual samples. To do this, the system evaluates the sample-drawing instructions. The sample-drawing instruction can use a sampling scheme to determine the total sample quantity.

Sometimes you might receive several inbound deliveries for the same purchase order or manufacturing order, but it is not practical to do the same quality inspection every time. In the same inspection document, you can summarize several stocks that have similar properties for inspection. You have the option to summarize stocks having the same combination of Product/Batch or Product/Batch/Reference Document (Purchase Order or Production/Process Order). A Business Add-In (BAdI) also allows a summarization according to a customized combination of properties. This summarization is possible when the quality inspection is standalone in the QIE, as well as integrated with SAP ERP QM.

The inspection document summary overrules the settings on Inspection Object Type (IOT) level regarding the automatic decision of the inspection document in the background, but this can be influenced by a BAdI.

An existing document is extended if an appropriate inspection document exists (released, not archived, to be archived, canceled, or decided) and the inspection has not begun in ERP. If there is no existing inspection document that can be extended (first document for the batch, wrong status), or the control for inspection summary has been changed on inspection level, a new inspection document is created. This occurs even if the inspection document summary is switched on.

There is one exception. If an inspection document is found that has a status of Decided, and the inspection summary control is set to One Inspection Document for Prod/Batch and Reference Document (Purchase Order / Manufacturing Order):

• The system creates a new inspection document if the valuation of the status was Rejected.

• The system suppresses the creation of a new inspection document if the decision has been valuated with Accepted. Therefore, the delivery item is posted directly to unrestricted stock without inspection process.