For manufacturers in regulated industries such as agribusiness and food and beverage, quality control has traditionally meant one of two things: a disconnected third-party system or a patchwork of spreadsheets, paper checklists, and institutional knowledge.
Neither scenario scales particularly well. More importantly, disconnected quality processes make audits, customer complaints, and recalls more difficult than they need to be.
Lot-level quality holds, certificates of analysis for regulated ingredients, sampling requirements, and feed or food safety documentation are everyday realities for these industries. Yet the systems managing purchasing, inventory, and production have not always managed the associated quality processes particularly well.
Microsoft is beginning to change that with new Quality Management capabilities introduced with Business Central version 28.
Why Integrated Quality Management Matters
Quality is rarely treated as a priority until something goes wrong.. A failed inspection can affect whether inventory is available, whether a production order can proceed, whether material needs to be quarantined, how much ingredient loss there is (and sunk cost there will be), whether a supplier return is required, and ultimately whether a finished product can be shipped.
When quality processes live outside the ERP, someone, or a few plant personnel, has to connect those dots manually.
Bringing quality management into Business Central creates an opportunity to manage the quality process alongside the transactions it effects. Instead of discovering that a lot failed inspection after someone has already allocated or consumed it, quality results can directly influence what happens to that inventory.
For regulated manufacturers, that’s an important distinction.
What Better Quality Management Looks Like
A well-designed quality process should make quality controls part of the normal flow of purchasing, inventory, and production. Inspections should happen when they’re supposed to happen. Failed material should be controlled immediately. Documentation should be tied to the underlying item or lot. And employees shouldn’t have to rely on institutional memory to know what happens next or manually walk through the warehouse figuring out traceability.
That’s where Business Central’s new Quality Management functionality becomes particularly interesting.
How Business Central Quality Management Works
Quality Management can trigger automated inspections at four points: purchase receipts, production output, assembly output, and on a defined schedule. A quality check can begin when a receipt is posted rather than waiting for someone to remember to pull a sample or initiate an inspection.
Checks can be scoped to an item, lot, serial number, or package number and can capture measurable physical properties such as weight, dimensions, and density, and not necessarily limited to a pass/fail result. Sampling rules can also be configured for every unit or a defined percentage, supporting the types of sampling processes many regulated manufacturers already use.
The real value becomes apparent when something fails.
Based on the result of a quality check, Business Central can support actions such as:
- Blocking affected inventory
- Moving material to quarantine
- Creating disposal adjustments
- Generating transfer orders
- Initiating vendor returns
- Producing quality certificates and certificates of analysis
Instead of quality existing alongside the operational process, the quality result can become part of that process.
For Business Central customers in regulated manufacturing or just where a keener eye on quality matters, this addresses a significant historical gap that often required third-party quality solutions or manual processes.
Not Just a Cloud Feature: New Core Functionality
Another important aspect of the release is that Quality Management isn’t limited to Business Central’s cloud deployment.
The functionality is part of version 28 and is available for both Business Central Online and on-premises deployments. For existing customers, the important consideration is therefore not simply how Business Central is deployed, but which version of Business Central the organization is running.
Organizations operating on older versions should evaluate their current environment, upgrade path, and quality requirements before assuming that a separate quality management platform is necessary.
The Takeaway
Business Central’s new Quality Management capabilities represent a meaningful shift for manufacturers. There’s now a formal, auditable quality process within the same platform that manages purchasing, inventory, and production.
That means fewer disconnected processes, better control of affected inventory, stronger traceability, and less reliance on manual intervention when quality issues occur.
For organizations already using Business Central, or considering it, quality management should now be part of the conversation.
How Captios Can Help
At Captios, we work with manufacturers to look beyond individual ERP features and understand how technology should support the complete operational and business processes.
That includes evaluating existing Business Central environments, identifying process and system gaps, determining whether new functionality can replace manual or third-party solutions, and developing an upgrade and implementation roadmap that aligns technology investments with the needs of the business.
If you’re currently using Business Central and want to understand what it would take to implement these Quality capabilities or are considering an ERP re-platform and Quality is a key consideration, reach out to Michael at pelsoci.michael@captiospartners.com to learn more.
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