An Overview of NetSuite ERP and Quality Management
By Ben Katerberg, Luxent, NetSuite Solution Architect
For many medical manufacturing companies ensuring quality standards are being met by vendors and/or by internal manufacturing operations is critical towards external compliance standards and the lifeblood for long-term profitability and customer satisfaction. Many medical manufacturing companies have historically maintained separate quality management systems outside of their day-to-day ERP systems, leading to delays, a lack of visibility, and process bottlenecks. What if there was a way to fully integrate your ERP with your Quality Management system?
Fortunately, NetSuite offers a fully integrated Quality Management Solution that is flexible, allows for automation of pre-inspection quarantine and subsequent release of inspection-compliant material, and the ability to generate wide-ranging reporting metrics.
- Flexibility: With reusable inspections, users can create a single version of each inspection and group them into specifications assigned to any number of materials. They can also specify global standards for each inspection or create material-specific standards. Sampling and Skip Lot functionality allow for flexible inspection frequencies and data counts, and users can also specify allowable failures, if any. Be aware that sometimes too much flexibility can result in inefficient setup, so be sure to find the right NetSuite expert that takes time to understand your business and understands some of the flexibility pitfalls.
- Automation: This is perhaps the most considerable benefit of QMS integration with NetSuite. The system can auto-trigger inspections based on inspection frequencies and bring them into a queue for their quality manager to assign to their quality engineers. Upon receipt of materials from vendors, workflows can systematically ‘quarantine’ material that NetSuite recognizes and disallows from commitment to work orders or customer sales orders. The workflows can also move material back to ‘good’ usable inventory upon satisfactory completion of an inspection, or even auto-trigger a return authorization back to the vendor in the case of a failed product inspection.
- Reporting: Quality is all about capturing data and transforming that data into meaningful reporting for decision making. Creating an incoming inspection scorecard, vendor scorecard, and a production specification scorecard combined with Lot Traceability will ensure managers have real-time notifications when a quality issue occurs and can react accordingly. These endlessly flexible reports allow quality managers to continually monitor quality trends in real-time before quality issues become too costly.
NetSuite is still rolling out new Quality Management improvements with each release (i.e. Release 2021.2 contains the coveted Certificate of Analysis document to provide inspection results to customers), so now is the time to look at this great software solution. Talk to your Luxent, a NetSuite Solution Provider, about whether NetSuite Quality Management is a good fit for your organization.
At Luxent, we build partnerships with our customers to create, develop, and deliver solutions that make their systems, processes, and people work better together. The Luxent team has a deep understanding of the needs of medical manufacturing companies—and pain points. Reach out today to learn more about how Luxent can transform your business with NetSuite.
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