Warehouse management with Quality Management (Part I)

Older Dynamics users will remember setting up quality management in Ax2012 and early versions of Dynamics 365 F&O. There; we could configure the Quality Associations to automatically trigger the quality orders when receiving a purchase order, for example. This is an excellent functionality that was overshadowed when managing WMS.

When using Advanced Warehouse Management and picking a purchase order, the quality association did not assume that a receipt had been made. Therefore it did not automatically create the quality order. What made us fall into workarounds, such as the disposition codes to send the merchandise to a quality location, or always receive and send to quality, creating manual orders, etc.

Today we have good news. New features solve the problem and extend warehouse management to quality control.

Activating the feature

To activate the feature, we go to the feature management workspace and see that we have three different elements there.

Quality management for warehouse processes

This functionality extends the warehouse receipt by taking the stock to the quality location, according to the quality associations, and returning it to the warehouse after the order is processed.

Quality Control

This feature allows registering a fast and automated quality control at reception. It is used for quick visual inspections carried out during the reception, and then if the worker accepts the reception, he sends the license plates to his location. On the other hand, if the reception is rejected, they are sent to a quality location for a second inspection.

Enable Inventory Quality Management Parameters Warning Feature

This feature warns us if quality management is enabled in case we are configuring the directives to use them.

The first two features are the ones that we must activate to control what we will see in this post. The third is optional.

Quality Sampling with Quality Association

Here we will explain how to carry out the process so that WMS takes the configuration of the quality associations and automatically triggers the quality orders at the time of purchase reception.

Given the following example: I receive an item, which has a quality association, what I require is that on receipt, I trigger a quality order and move the inventory to a quality area or location for the quantity defined by the sampling.

Step 1: We must go directly to the quality association in the path Inventory management> Configure> Quality control> Quality associations:

Applicable warehouse type gives us two options.

All -> would include all stores that do not have store processes.

Quality management for warehouse processes only --> Includes warehouses with the parameter of quality orders for warehouse processes.

It is necessary to activate the warehouse in the "Warehouses" section, the parameter "Enable quality orders for warehouse processes."

In short, the "All" option only applies to warehouses without WMS. The second option is for warehouses with WMS.

In this step, we must take into account that sampling is what validates the quantity that is going to move to quality. If we work with 10% sampling, the warehouse work will be generated by 10% of the amount entered.

Step 2: We must configure a working template of the "Quality Sampling" type. This directive will fulfill the function of picking and placing the material for the quantity defined by the sampling we configured in Step 1.

In this example, we configure select and drop actions.

Step 3 – In combination with the previous step, we generate a Quality Sampling Location Policy. This directive is to create an exception to the movement of receipt of purchases and take the sample quantity to our zone/location of quality.

When configuring the policy, it is only necessary to have the type of placement work, as in the case of receiving purchases.

In the Actions section of the location directive, we will put a filter from the edit query button. There we will leave, for this example, the assigned QA location. If having more than one, we could generate a Quality zone and filter the placement step to that zone.

Processing the feature:

After creating the purchase order, we will receive the Order through the app.

In the purchase reception menu, we register, and the following jobs will be created:

As we can see, in the configured case, the quality sampling job will be created for us. This job contains the amount of sampling (in this case, 10% of the receipt) and will take it to the quality location.

The other work is for the placement of the receipt of the purchase order, which will take the rest of the receipt (90% of the quantity received) to the final placement location of this item.

In addition to this, a quality order will be generated, thanks to the configuration of the "Quality Associations" linked to the purchase order entered:

In the second part of this post, we will review the output of this quality order and the new work of quality control of warehouse management.