Analyzing Master Data for Inspections in Production

In your role as quality planner you are responsible to set-up the required master data for quality management. For the production process, you want to enable in-process inspections during production and goods receipt inspections when posting the goods receipt for a (production or process) order. You must consider the following:

• Which material is to be inspected?
• Should there be an in-process or a goods receipt inspection?
• What are the inspection steps?
• What is to be inspected?

The following figure illustrates how you set up the required master data in the system.

1. Which material will be inspected?

   To generally enable quality inspections, you must assign and activate an inspection type in the material master.

2. Should there be an in-process or a goods receipt inspection?

   For in-process inspections, an inspection type that is assigned to inspection lot origin 03 must be active. For goods receipt inspections, an inspection type that is assigned to inspection lot origin 04 must be active. If required, you can also activate both inspection types and execute both processes simultaneously.

3. What are the inspection steps?

   Each inspection is described as an inspection operation. For in-process inspections, you must include your inspection steps into the production master data, that is routing in discrete manufacturing or recipe in process manufacturing. For goods receipt inspections, you must define your inspection steps in an inspection plan.

4. What is to be inspected?

   Each parameter that is evaluated during quality inspection, and for which you want to record results, corresponds to an inspection characteristic. Inspection characteristics can be qualitative (for example, labeling okay, color, and so on) or quantitative (for example, concentration, power consumption, length, and so on). Note that inspection characteristics represent a separate kind of master data in SAP S/4HANA Quality Management. We will discuss more details in a later chapter of this course.