Executing a Delivery Inspection

The quality planner defined in the master data that a goods issue inspection is required before a material is delivered to ensure that the agreed quality specifications are met, or that the goods are still okay after they were stored in the warehouse. As the quality technician, you inspect the goods, and as the quality engineer, you make a usage decision before the goods can be delivered to your customers.

Review the process in the example that is illustrated in the following figure.

To execute the scenario defined above, you execute the following steps in the SAP S/4HANA system:

1. If a quality inspection for the delivery to customer is active in the material master of the sold good, the SAP S/4HANA system automatically creates an inspection lot when you create the outbound delivery.

2. The quality technician executes the quality inspection and records inspection results and/or defects in the inspection lot.

3. Based on the findings, the quality engineer makes a positive or negative decision on whether to ship the inspected goods.

4. If the goods are accepted, the warehouse clerk posts the goods issue for the delivery so that the goods are shipped to the customer. If the goods are rejected, you cannot post a goods issue. In this case, you would typically remove the delivery item, create a new one, re-execute the quality inspection with a positive result and decision, and finally, complete the goods issue process.

If a delivery contains several batches of the same materials, you can, for example, inspect each batch individually and make an individual usage decision.

To execute quality inspections for outbound deliveries, the quality planner needs to set up the following master data:

• Inspection type in the material master

  The material must have an active inspection type assigned for outbound delivery inspections. There are two relevant scenarios: delivery to customer with sales order and delivery to customer without sales order. Depending on whether you create a delivery without a sales order or go through a standard sales process with a sales order and related delivery, you can define and perform different quality inspections, for example, using different inspection plans.

• Quality info record sales

  You can specify when the quality inspection should be carried out for each customer and/or customer-material combination. By default, the quality inspection occurs before you can post a goods issue for the delivery. However, in special cases (for example, if there is a quality agreement in place), you can allow goods issue posting before the inspection or even skip the creation of the goods issue inspection lot.

• Inspection plan

  In an inspection plan, you define the inspection steps as operations and the characteristics for which you want to record results as inspection characteristics. The latter are assigned on an operation level.

In this SAP S/4HANA system demonstration, the following steps will be executed:

1. Create a sales order
2. Create a delivery for the sales order
3. Execute goods issue inspection
4. Make usage decision
5. Post goods issue