Recording Inspection Results for an Inspection Lot During Production

Different materials are manufactured in production with either production orders or process orders. You want to enter the inspection results for specific inspection characteristics during production with an in-process inspection. The inspection results are needed for later process documentation or for quality control.

As already explained in a previous unit, defects identified during production can also be documented in defects recording. This lesson focuses on the "one-time" entry of inspection results for inspection characteristics in the inspection lot for the order. Repetitive entry of inspection results for inspection characteristics using inspection points is explained in another course (→ Performing Quality Management in Production Using Inspection Points and Samples).

In the figure, the parallel execution of the manufacturing and quality inspection process steps, respectively, is displayed. There are four manufacturing operations. The third operation is a combined inspection and manufacturing operation where the worker performs, for example, component assembly and afterward executes a functional test to verify that the components were assembled correctly.

For inspection-relevant production operations you capture inspection results for the quantitative and qualitative inspection characteristics which are assigned to the respective production operation. Note that, depending on the business requirement, you can either combine inspection and manufacturing operations into one operation or alternatively define two individual operations for inspection and production, respectively.

The results are updated in the statistics and can be used for analysis purposes. You can evaluate and monitor this data using the Quality Management Analytic. For example, you can use the Inspection Lot Analytics or the Characteristic Analytics apps, respectively.

You record results in several steps:

1. The quality technician records the inspection results for all inspection characteristics.
2. Depending on the configuration of the inspection characteristic, the system or the user valuates the characteristic as accepted or rejected.
3. The processing of the characteristic is finalized by changing the status to closed.

Depending on the result recording configuration, steps 2 and 3 can occur automatically or you can trigger them manually in the result recording transactions. In general, when you use native SAP Fiori based apps for result recording, valuation and closing occurs automatically.

Similar to other inspection lot based processes in SAP Quality Management, you complete the inspection lot with a usage decision. In production, you usually only define a usage decision code "accepted" and "rejected", respectively, depending on the result of the quality inspection and/or the assignment of defects to the lot. Note that in-process inspection lots are never stock relevant as the produced quantities are managed by the order.

To automate the usage decision, you can schedule a job using transaction QA41 in the SAP S/4HANA system. However, since the usage decision in inspection lots for orders is of a rather technical nature and does not affect subsequent business processes, defects and rejections of characteristics are not taken into consideration when the usage decision is automated using transaction QA41.