SAP Quality & Batch Management

Understanding SAP Batch Management‍

Batch Management is essential for industries that are required to track their product movements through batches. Whether the goal is to meet regulatory obligations or to support mature supply chain economics, speed and efficiency is of the essence to mitigate the impact of a product recall including bad press, sickness, or worse.

Imagine being able to provide the necessary information and visibility to make meaningful and timely decisions regarding batch processes.

Speedy and efficient tracking is easier said than done. Too often, organizations are forced to work with siloed information that is in accurate, missing, and incomplete. Those who implement SAP Global Batch Traceability (GBT) are many steps ahead. By gaining visibility into product batch genealogy, they benefit from greatly improved Time to Insight and gain more time to take informed corrective action.

Reveal optimizes this efficiency even further. Using our oVo® methodology, we help organizations implement Batch Management. Providing the ability to use functionality such as GBT to perform rapid “where used” analysis to inform batch recalls and more.

The Purpose of Batch Management

Effective Batch Management provides invaluable and immediate insight into product batch genealogy for both upstream- and downstream-impacted batches and objects. By utilizing a single source of truth, stakeholders can more confidently trust the reporting information they receive on product genealogy.

The ability of stakeholders to view a chain of custody for serialized products and track materials through multi-level bills of materials leads to a faster reaction and more focused recalls, holds and withdrawals. And that, in turn, results in reduced liability and costs on recalls.

Challenges of Batch Management

Without Batch Management, lack of visibility abounds. Stakeholders struggle to track batches, serial numbers or handling units/packages across the various disparate systems and spreadsheets used to manage batches. Multiple sources of information proliferate and generally, any solutions that emerge are siloed and restricted by the source of the information. Most troubling, inconsistent, inaccurate and missing data in the product genealogy leads to an incomplete analysis being performed, opening the door to regulatory scrutiny, possible fines and adverse customer experiences.

The Result

With regulatory compliance demands being enforced, organizations that do not efficiently address Batch Management leave themselves vulnerable to corporate liability, financial exposure and lose of customer trust.

Optimizing Batch Management provides you with immediate insight into your product batch genealogy. Through fast and efficient analysis of product batch or multiple batch distribution records, gleaned through a repository of batch-related objects and relationships between these objects, you can quickly drill down to the root cause of the defect and mitigate the impact.

Whether it’s optimizing supply chain performance or implementing additional SAP functionality, Reveal helps organizations improve internal business processes, educate users and deploy the smart use of SAP to achieve sustainable, tangible value. By challenging organizations to move away from being transactionally driven and move towards information-users that manage the process and apply knowledge, improvements in agility, service, cost, and inventory performance are achieved.

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Quality Management

Quickly identifying material failures

Quality control in the supply chain is critical for maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace and reducing operating costs. If raw materials are flawed, it can make entire production lines inefficient and increase defect rates in finished goods inventory. Also, inferior materials may require extra machining or refining, which adds to employees’ workloads and total manufacturing costs. On the other end, customers who are forced to return items because of quality issues may lose respect for the company and eventually stop purchasing products.

Quality is the result of intelligent effort. Quality control in the supply chain ultimately helps to protect a company’s reputation.

Utilizing SAP Quality Management helps businesses implement and run quality control processes. It is designed to prevent defects, enable continuous process improvement, and establish sustained quality control programs. Potential benefits for the organization include compliance with manufacturing quality regulations, lower operating costs, and improving customer satisfaction. The better the controls overproduction inputs, the less risk of returns and potentially hazardous product failures.

Reveal’s oVo®  methodology helps organizations improve their quality control process through the use of Quality Management and establishing best practices to maximize the processes for goods as they move through the product lifecycle, including inspecting goods as they come into a facility, when they go through production and when they are shipped out as finished goods.

What Is Effective Quality Management  

Because quality management is fully integrated with other functional areas including materials management, production planning, finance, plant maintenance and more, it is essential SAP be used as the single source of truth and the data being used is real-time, accurate and available. Information needs to flow from and to each area allowing for effective quality planning, inspections, certifications, notifications and reporting. With trustworthy data, processes leveraging SAP best practices and educated team members, the organization can rapidly identify potential issues, take actions when required and implement corrective tasks while automating non value-add steps in the quality control process.

The Reality

Quality impacts nearly every step in the process for final product assembly. Integrating a quality control process that measures and monitors at each step avoids costs to re-work products, improves customer satisfactions, decreases capital tied up in defective materials and reduces liability risks. Using SAP Quality Management to help manage these processes will go along way to efficiently and effectively provide value to the business. The reality though is the system is only one part of the solution. Organizations must have trustworthy data moving through the system, align processes with SAP best practices, establish KPIs for continuous improvement and educate teams to empower all these parts. When organizations get this right, they have a quality control organization that can cost effectively scale and support the organization’s quality objectives.  

Whether it’s optimizing supply chain performance or implementing additional SAP functionality, Reveal helps organizations improve internal business processes, educate users and deploy the smart use of SAP to achieve sustainable, tangible value. By challenging organizations to move away from being transactionally driven and move towards information-users that manage the process and apply knowledge, improvements in agility, service, cost, and inventory performance are achieved.