How NetSuite Helps Manufacturers Improve Quality Management

Designing, manufacturing, distributing and selling a high-quality product doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a company-wide commitment to enforce policies and standards.

NetSuite’s Quality Management solution is designed to help manufacturers deliver the highest-quality products with minimal overhead regardless of the size and complexity of business and product line.

Specifically, NetSuite helps manufacturers define inspection plans, pass/fail criteria and collect results — all in real-time.

Let’s look more closely at the functionality that NetSuite offers manufacturers.

Inspections

The inspection record defines exactly what it is that you want your quality engineer to check.

These inspection records can be re-used. For example, you only have to create a “check for material certificates” inspection once. These are later grouped into specifications that are then applied to items, etc. There are currently two main types of inspections that are supported.

With qualitative inspections, the inspector can verify that the item is in good overall condition or verify that the appropriate certificates are in place.

Quantitative inspections, on the other hand, allow you to define multiple measurable elements along with criteria for acceptance, such as diameter, width, length, temperature or even chemical composition.

Skip Lot, Sample Size and Failures

Within each inspection, you can also specify how many items need to be inspected and define rules for inspecting specific sequences of lot or serial tracked items. Failures then define how many of the inspected units can fail inspection before the inspection itself is failed, kicking off the non-conformance workflow.

As an administrator, you are able to distinguish sample data from summary or aggregate data and control whether sample data should be recorded in NetSuite or stored externally, allowing you to easily work with larger volumes of raw data sets.

Test Definition

Each inspection can be setup with multiple data elements that define the parameters of the inspection process.

Specifications

The specification record groups relate inspections to establish quality activities. For example, when receiving some raw materials, you might confirm dimensions as well as verify that the appropriate certification is present. Additionally, the specification record allows the user to:

• Associate specifications to item/vendor/location combinations
• Define inspection frequency via settings for skip lot, sampling and more
• Define conformance rules that establish when an item fails an inspection
• Display error messages that describe where and why updates failed

Automatic Triggering of Inspections

Based on item/vendor/location associations, NetSuite item receipt transactions are monitored and can initiate inspection activities with different rules for each.

Inspector Assignment

Once an item has been identified as requiring inspection, an entry is made into the inspection queue where an individual quality engineer can be assigned to perform the task.

Workflows can be used to automatically assign inspectors based on location, vendor, inspection type, etc.

Perform Inspections via Tablet

The quality tablet interface enables quality engineers to perform inspections, review standards, record data and submit data for analysis directly from the inspection area providing real-time feedback and instant access to test results.

Workflow Driven Non-Conformance

Quality failures, or non-conformances, can drive additional activities within NetSuite through customizable workflows. The application provides initial workflows for:

• Quarantine and release
• Initiation of vendor return authorizations

Roles

The system comes with three distinct roles that are assigned to existing users:

• Quality administrator: responsible for setup and maintenance of quality specifications, context checks and workflow
• Quality manager: responsible for monitoring and managing quality execution and reporting
• Quality engineer: responsible for quality data collection

Key Benefits

To recap, NetSuite’s Quality Management solution enables manufacturers to:

• Formalize quality policies, standards and practices
• Improve product quality
• Initiate quality activities from business transactions
• Work with large volumes of raw data sets
• Collect in-process and incoming inspection results
• Compare pass/fail criteria
• Integrate non-conformance reporting
• Reduce cost of quality

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Contact us online or give us a call at 410.685.5512 to see NetSuite in action.