Quality Management

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Quality Management

Quality Management covers the processes of inspection and recording and analyzing inspection results. The main documents used in QM include the purchase order, production order, goods receipt, and inspection lot.

CAUTION

Reaching Quality Management Help  

For help on Quality Management, choose Help, Help Library, Materials Management, and then scroll down to Quality Management.

Inspection is closely tied in with quality management. SAP R/3 uses three basic "inspection terms":

• The Inspection Catalog ”  

  Groupsinformation about materials such as attributes, possible defects, defect causes, and so on. It's a hierarchical list, matching similar characteristics. Various combinations of characteristics may be useful at different companies.

• The Inspection Plan ”  

  Contains master inspection characteristics, inspection catalog data, and inspection methods .

  Plain English

  Master Inspection Characteristics  

  Can include such characteristics as weight, color , surface finish, and so on.

  
  

• An Inspection Lot ”  

  Can stand alone or can be created as part of an inspection plan (see Figure B.1). Inspection results are recorded only for inspections done with an inspection plan. If you want to record inspection results based on inspection characteristics, you need to assign an inspection plan.

Figure B.1. An inspection lot can stand alone or be part of an inspection plan.

The flow chart in Figure B.2 shows a typical sequence that illustrates what QM does. It's just one way QM could work at your plant. The setup at your plant could be different from this example.

Figure B.2. A typical flow for Quality Management.

Quality Management can be set up (on the Material Master) in one of three ways: no quality management, quality management in procurement, or quality management with inspection processing. QM provides many features to help you manage the quality of your goods:

• QM controls movement of goods in and out of inspection stock for both procurement and inspection processing.

• With procurement, you can block activity for quality reasons at several stages. Quotation, purchase order, and goods receipt can all be blocked. You can also block purchase of one material from a vendor or all materials from a vendor.

• QM can also help you evaluate vendors , manage quality certificates, and set up quality assurance agreements and technical delivery terms.

• With inspection processing, QM controls inspection lot creation, sample drawing, recording of results, and usage decisions.

• Dynamic modification allows automatic adjustments of the sample sizes and inspection plans based on the quality level. For example, a recent lower quality performance would trigger more rigorous inspections.

• The Quality Management module is ISO 9004 “compliant, including inspection planning, internal quality audits , quality system documentation, statistical sampling, test equipment, material traceability, and quality costs.

Plain English

ISO 9004  

An international quality standard defining processes a company must use to be certified. Many buyers now require their vendors and suppliers to be ISO 9000 certified.

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