I’ve been implementing Business Central (and Dynamics NAV before that) for manufacturing companies for over two decades now. And in almost every single implementation, at some point during the requirements workshops, someone from quality or operations asks: “Can the system handle quality inspections?”

The answer used to be: “Not really, not out of the box. We’ll need an add-on for that.”

Well, that changes with Business Central version 28. Microsoft has added native quality management functionality, and from what I can see in the early access preview, it’s not just a checkbox feature—it actually looks great 🙂 , it is completely new module.

What Quality Management Can Do

In version 28, Business Central now includes the ability to evaluate the quality of goods and materials, and it’s woven into the areas where you’d need it, Purchase Receipts, Production Output, Assembly Output, Sales Returns, and Ad-hoc or Scheduled Quality Checks of inventory.

You can check by individual items, lots, serial numbers, and package numbers, with user defined assessment parameters. The system lets you define whether you want to inspect a fixed quantity or a percentage of the total quantity received or produced.

This isn’t just about recording pass/fail results. Quality check plans can be defined alongside quarantine processes, preventing the use of items that fail checks before they reach the next stage of your operation.

And also some out of the box printouts for Certificate of Analysis, Non Conformance Report and an Inspection Report. Sweet! 🙂

Why This Is So Nice

For years, quality management in Business Central has been the domain of ISV solutions. I have worked with several of them, some are great and some are not so great. The Quality Assurance from Cosmo Consult is my favorite and the one I have implemented the most (done lots of process manufacturing implementation with this one). It is also the most complete (maybe also complex) one I have seen. So now there is an alternative as part of the standard BC solution, maybe for those that does not require all the bells and whistles that the Cosmo solution brings.

How Quality Management Works

Here are the basics of the new Quality Management Module.

Quality Inspection Templates

You define what needs to be inspected, when, and how. This includes which items or item categories require inspection, what parameters to measure (weight, dimensions, visual checks, etc.), and whether you’re sampling or inspecting the full quantity.

You do this by defining Quality Inspection Templates like the one below. The templates has lines with test codes that are user define, and you can define what type of values you enter (Boolean, Decimal, Integer, Text, Lookup Values, etc..). One of the more interesting features is the ability to specify a lookup to any table in the system to select values from. On this template you also define the accepted values, which makes it very much item related (even though you can have one template that’s used across multiple items).

Quality Inspection Generation Rules

The Quality Inspection Templets are then related to the items and process via the Quality Inspection Generation Rules (long name 🙂 ). This is where you define what items, customers, vendors and process the template will be used for. The quality check can trigger automatically when you post a purchase receipt, finish a production order, or complete an assembly. You can also create ad-hoc checks—useful for periodic audits or customer complaints. This setup if fairly generic where you apply filters to various tables to define conditions.

Quality Inspection

The Quality Inspection record is like an order that’s created in the system to enter the results of the inspection. In the below example it was created automatically when I posted the receipt of a purchase order with a lot tracked item based on the setup in the Quality Inspection Generation Rules table described above (inspections like this applies mostly to tracked inventory, rarely do I hear someone saying that they want to record inspections on inventory that’s not tracked).

The header of the Quality Inspection has a No. to identify it and fields for the item number, lot number, sample size, who created it, etc.. The fields that you would expect.

The lines of the Quality Inspection has the values to enter, valid range, etc.., those are based on the Quality Inspection Templates described earlier.

After all the values are entered you see if each one is a pass or fail. If one of them is a fail the entire Quality Inspection is considered a fail. This is then where the Quality Inspection Results comes into play, via this setup you can control what you are allowed to do with a lot, serial or package that fails or are pending to be inspected. Are you allow to sell it, consume it, etc..

Quality Workflows and Quarantine

The Quality Inspection Results acts a bit as Quarantine since it can be setup to prevent using inventory that’s no good. But the other feature that exists is to have inventory being moved to a certain bin or reclassified to a certain location based on the results of the Quality Inspection.

To do this you setup a workflow, below is an example of a workflow like this that triggers based on the Quality Inspection being finished and the condition where the Result Code = FAIL. The response then moves the inventory to a specific location / bin that you define as part of the options in the response. Kind of nice actually.

There are a number of different predefined responses that comes with the Quality Management module, and I am fairly sure you can also add the standard notification responses if you for example would like to receive an e-mail notification if an inspection fails.

Certificates and Reporting

You can generate quality certificates and certificates of analysis. Certificates are a common requirement when implementing a quality module, so it is great to see that there are some standard options for printing those that can be used as a basis. They are printed from the header of the Quality Inspection record.

Get Business Central Version 28 and the Quality Management

If you have not yet upgraded one of your Business Central environments to version 28 I think you need to do that soon and check this out. One thing that I noticed was that the Quality Management solution was not automatically installed when I upgraded to version 28, I had to find and install it via AppSource. This I believe is the fist time I had to manually install a standard extension from Microsoft (took me a while to realize actually).

I like this Quality Management module. Not because it’s flashy (it’s not), but because it common requirement and seems simple to implement. I am now thinking I will have to extend our solution for Manufacturing Execution solution to include things like barcodes to create Quality Inspections, pages for tablets to enter results, etc.. And I would need to update my Record Deletion Tool to also delete the Quality Management Inspection records when cleaning up test transactions, stay tune for that one.

If you’re already using a quality management extension and it’s working well, there’s no reason to rip it out. But if you’re about to buy one, evaluate whether the native functionality is good enough for your needs.

Other Features Worth Noticing in Business Central Version 28

Quality management is just one of the new features in version 28. Microsoft has also added Approval Workflows for Item Journals, Requisition Worksheets, and Planning Worksheets (another long-requested feature), the Payables Agent, which monitors mailboxes for vendor invoices and uses AI to draft purchase invoices has been improved and so have drop shipments, including the ability to create purchase orders from drop shipments and post purchase invoices independently of sales invoices. Just to name a few of the additional features.

I’ll likely write more about some of these once I’ve had a chance to test them properly. The Payables Agent imporvements in particular looks interesting—if it works as advertised, it could save accounting teams a lot of time.

For now, if you’re in manufacturing or distribution and quality management has been a pain point, version 28 is worth upgrading to.

Cheers!