Introduction to SAP QM

What is SAP QM or Quality Management?

SAP QM is a key module of SAP ERP and can be used for following

Quality planning

• Basic master data for Quality Management
• Inspection planning using inspection plans of materials, which brings standardization of quality planning.

Quality assurance

• SAP Quality inspection is performed through inspection lot processing. During this process quality results are captured, and usage decision is taken to accept or reject the inspection lot.
• Quality certificates of analysis

Quality control

• In SAP QM Quality notifications the root cause analysis is done for the identified defect.
• SAP QM information system is where you can analyze various reports like vendor evaluation, a list of quality notification, quality charts, etc.

SAP QM- Business Processes

1. Quality Management in Procurement

SAP Quality Management is fully integrated with the purchasing and Inventory Management process.
It consists of receiving inspection wherein material is received against the purchase order. Inspection lot is triggered if the material is flagged for quality check.
Quality results are entered against master inspection characteristics. Whether the results are within/out of tolerance limits, based on that usage decision (accept/reject inspection lot) is taken.

Stock posting from quality to other stock categories needs to be done subsequently in SAP system.

2. Quality Management in Production

SAP Quality Management is used to connect with the production and Inventory Management process.
It describes "In process inspections" where inspection lot is triggered on production order release.
In "inspection after production", inspection lot is triggered after goods receipt is posted from production order.
"In process inspections" are not relevant to inventory whereas inspection after production involves stock posting from quality to other stock categories.
This process describes inspection lot processing wherein quality results are entered against master inspection characteristics. Usage decision ( accept/reject) is taken depending on the quality results.

3. Quality Notifications

In this process, you can see how defects found during a quality inspection are analysed and captured in a SAP quality notification.
Here, we do record the root cause analysis of the problems found during inspection to avoid its re-occurrence.
For SAP QM inprocess inspections also, we can raise internal quality notification and record our problem analysis.

Benefits of SAP QM

SAP QM provides lot of benefits for any company at various levels, for example through:

• Quality integration with procurement and production and hence more control over the process.
• Planning support ( usage of inspection plans )
• Monitoring of vendor and customer complaints by implementing corrective tasks in SAP QM quality notifications.
• Automation of quality certificates which are printed during sales delivery to customers.

Next, we will look into each phase of SAP QM and learn how to operate SAP QM module.