Recurring Inspections for Batch-Managed Materials

Certain materials that are maintained in batches and stored in warehouses must be inspected on a regular basis to ensure that quality requirements are maintained. The quality management team can use the SAP S/4HANA Quality Management component to monitor these materials automatically on the basis of the batch expiration date, inspection interval, and next inspection date.

By monitoring the best-before and the next inspection date, the system can automatically identify all batches that are defined for inspection lot creation, a status change of the batch, or a transfer posting from unrestricted-use stock to quality inspection stock. Recurring inspections are triggered by a report. You can execute it manually or automatically. When recurring inspections are triggered, the report selects the batches, changes the batch status, and creates the inspection lots according to your processing parameters.

The following figure shows an example with three batches of one material with different date values.

There are three batches of a batch-managed material in stock: the first batch is expired since the best-before date lies in the past. The other two batches are not expired as the best-before date is in the future. However, they differentiate in the next inspection date: the date of batch two lies within today's date plus an opening window; the date of batch three lies outside this window.

Running the report on 15.07.2023, the report changes the status of batch one to restricted as the best-before date is in the past and the batch is therefore expired.

For batch two, the report creates an inspection lot and moves the batch stock from unrestricted-use to quality inspection stock since the next inspection date is within today's date and the opening window.

For batch three, the report does not do anything at this point in time since the best-before date and the next inspection date lie in the future and outside the specified opening window. When running the report at a later point in time at which the next inspection date lies within the date of execution and the opening window, the system also creates an inspection lot for batch three and moves the stock to quality inspection.

What have the quality engineer and quality technician to do?

• For batch one, the quality engineer must decide what to do with the expired batch: they could, for example, trigger a manual quality inspection to check whether the expired batch can still be used. If not, it must be scrapped.
• For batch two, the quality technician executes the quality inspection and the quality engineer makes a usage decision based on the inspection results. If the quality inspection passed, the quality engineer posts the quality inspection stock back to unrestricted-use stock. If necessary, they could also modify the best-before and/or next inspection date.

What master data must the quality planner maintain to enable recurring inspections in the SAP S/4HANA system?

• Material Master: An inspection type of inspection lot origin 09 (recurring inspections) must be assigned an active in the QM view of the material master. To automatically calculate the next inspection date when you post a goods receipt for a batch, the inspection interval must be maintained.
• Inspection Plan: If you want to execute the quality inspection with a task list, an inspection plan must be available.