Set Up and Configure Quality Inspector

Quality Inspector for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central lets you define what should be inspected, when inspections should be created, how results are evaluated, and what should happen when an inspection passes or fails. To find more information on Quality Inspector try exploring https://kb.dmsiworks.com/knowledge-base/quality-inspector/.

Before creating automated quality inspections, configure the foundation that Quality Inspector uses to create and evaluate tests. The exact configuration depends on your quality processes. For example, an organization that only performs incoming inspection may require receiving rules, while a manufacturer performing in-process inspections may require production rules and integration with production output.

A typical Quality Inspector implementation follows this sequence:

1. Review your Business Central processes and prerequisites.
2. Assign the required permissions.
3. Complete the Quality Inspector setup with the Quality Inspector Setup Wizard.
4. Configure grades, especially for any scenarios that are more complex than ‘PASS’,’FAIL’, and ‘INPROGRESS’.
5. Configure the questions, measurements, and checks you want to perform (note, you can also do this as you define the templates).
6. Create Quality Inspection Templates.
7. Confirm the source configurations that determine where inspection information comes from.
8. Create test generation rules that determine when each template applies.
9. Configure automatic test creation where required.
10. Configure optional inventory restrictions, sampling, Non-Conformance Reports (NCRs), workflows, or other quality processes.
11. Validate the configuration with representative Business Central transactions.

1. Review your quality inspection requirements

Before configuring Quality Inspector, identify where inspections are required in your Business Central processes.

Common scenarios include:

• Receiving inspection – Inspect purchased material when it is received.
• Production inspection – Inspect manufactured items when production output is posted or at specific stages of production.
• In-process inspection – Collect measurements or checklist results while manufacturing work is being performed.
• Assembly inspection – Create inspections from assembly output.
• Warehouse inspection – Create inspections when inventory is received, put away, or moved.
• Periodic inspection – Schedule recurring inspections for equipment, work centers, facilities, inventory, or other records.
• Ad hoc inspection – Allow users to manually create inspections when required.

An organization can use one or several of these approaches.

If inspections are related to inventory lots, serial numbers, or packages, also review the Business Central Item Tracking Code, location, warehouse, and related inventory configuration. Quality Inspector can perform inspections against both tracked and untracked inventory, but item tracking is required when your quality processes depend on identifying or restricting a particular lot, serial number, or package.

For an introduction to the different interfaces available for entering inspection results, see Available User Interfaces for Recording Quality Inspections.

Quality Inspector from Insight Works allows recording Quality Inspection data via:

• The full Business Central web client / desktop interface.
• Phone/Tablet with the Business Central app with a specialized role center optimized for phone/tablet layouts.
• Industrial scanners / ruggedized tablets using the Warehouse Insight app and the offering on the Warehouse Insight app catalogue.
• Shop Floor Insight when collecting in-progress inspections while also recording shop floor activity.
• Microsoft Teams (with Power Automate)
• Paper-based with Quality Inspector’s AI integration with Azure Document Intelligence.

2. Assign permissions

Users require the appropriate Business Central permission sets before they can configure or use Quality Inspector.

Quality Inspector also includes functional permissions that can be used to control which quality-related activities an individual inspector can perform. These permissions are separate from the Business Central permission sets that grant access to the underlying tables and pages.

For example, you may want different permissions for:

• Quality administrators who configure Quality Inspector.
• Quality supervisors who review, assign, finish, or override inspections.
• Inspectors who primarily record inspection results.
• Production employees who perform inspections while recording production.
• Receiving employees who create or work with inspections during receiving.

Configure Business Central access first, and then use Quality Inspector’s inspector-specific permissions where additional control is required.

The Quality Inspector Setup page includes access to the Quality Inspectors and Quality Inspection Permissions configuration. See Quality Inspector Setup for additional information.

Note that functional permissions are configured with the Quality Inspectors and Quality Inspector Permissions page.

3. Complete the Quality Inspector setup

Navigate to the Quality Inspector Setup in Business Central.

The Quality Inspector Setup page contains company-wide configuration that controls how Quality Inspector behaves, including defaults used when creating templates and generation rules, automatic test creation, user-interface behavior, workflows, sampling configuration, and other application-wide options.

Review the setup before creating your inspection processes. In particular, consider:

• Whether Quality Inspector should be visible to users.
• How Quality Inspector should behave if an inspection already exists for a source record.
• Which automatic creation triggers should be enabled.
• Which quality inspection information should be displayed.
• Whether Business Central workflow integration will be used.
• Whether sampling plans or tools are required.
• Whether Non-Conformance Reports will be used to manage nonconforming results.

The automation triggers on this page define defaults. Do not enable every automatic trigger simply because it is available. Automatic creation should normally correspond to an actual generation rule and business process that you intend to use.

For descriptions of the available settings, see Quality Inspector Setup.

4. Configure grades

Grades represent the possible states or results of a quality inspection, such as:

• In Progress
• Fail
• Pass

You can also define additional grades when a simple pass/fail process is not sufficient. For example, an organization might distinguish between minor, major, and critical failures or use multiple acceptable quality classifications.

Grades are evaluated by priority. Grade conditions can be defined as defaults and then carried into quality inspection fields and templates.

Before building templates, confirm that the grades required by your quality processes have been configured correctly.

For details about grade priority, default conditions, grade visibility, and configuring grade conditions, see Configure Grades.

5. Configure the fields you want to inspect

Quality Inspection Fields define the individual questions, measurements, observations, or checks that can be added to inspection templates.

Examples include:

• Weight
• Length
• Temperature
• Visual condition
• Packaging condition
• Yes/No checklist questions
• Dates
• Text observations
• Values selected from another Business Central table

For each field, you can define the type of information that can be entered, allowable values, and grade conditions that determine how the recorded result is evaluated.

Configure commonly reused fields before creating your templates. A field can then be included on multiple templates, while individual templates can override its configuration when necessary.

6. Create Quality Inspection Templates

A Quality Inspection Template defines what should be inspected.

A template groups together the fields that an inspector must complete for a particular type of inspection. For example:

• A RECEIVING template might contain packaging condition, dimensions, and visual inspection fields.
• A FINAL template might contain final measurements and approval checks.
• A FIRSTARTICLE template might contain a larger set of dimensional checks.
• A WORKCENTER template might contain a daily equipment or work-area checklist.

Templates can also define template-specific grade conditions, sampling behavior, instructions, and other options.

A useful way to distinguish templates from generation rules is:

The template defines what to inspect. The test generation rule defines when that template should be used.

When possible, create reusable templates around the quality process rather than creating a separate template for every individual item. Test generation rules can then determine which items, vendors, item categories, locations, work centers, or other records use the template.

For a complete receiving example that includes fields, a template, and a generation rule, see Create Quality Inspections for Receipts.

7. Review source configurations

A Quality Inspector Source Configuration determines how information from a Business Central record is transferred to a quality inspection.

For example, an inspection created from a purchase line may need information such as:

• Item No.
• Document No.
• Quantity
• Vendor
• Location
• Lot or serial information

Quality Inspector includes source configurations for common scenarios. You can also configure additional source mappings when creating inspections from other Business Central tables or custom records.

Before manually creating new source configurations, verify whether an existing configuration already supports the source record you intend to inspect.

Source configurations are particularly important for advanced generation rules because they determine both the information placed onto an inspection and the information available when Quality Inspector evaluates the source.

8. Create test generation rules

After creating a template, configure one or more Quality Inspection Test Generation Rules.

Generation rules connect an inspection template to the Business Central records for which that template should be used.

For example, you can create rules that apply:

• A receiving template to one specific item.
• A receiving template to an item category.
• A production template to selected manufactured items.
• A test to a particular vendor.
• An inspection to a particular location, bin, work center, or other Business Central record.

Filters on the rule determine when the rule applies.

For example:

RECEIVING template + Purchase Line source + Item Category = RAW MATERIAL

can be used to specify that the RECEIVING template applies when raw materials are received.

Where possible, use the receiving, production, warehouse, and other rule wizards provided by Quality Inspector. The wizards simplify the creation of common generation rules and reduce configuration errors.

For examples, see:

• Create a Test Generation Rule for a Specific Item in Quality Inspector
• Create a Test Generation Rule for a Category of Items in Quality Inspector
• Create a Production Rule in Quality Inspector

When multiple generation rules can match the same record, review their filters and ordering carefully so that the resulting inspection behavior is intentional.

9. Configure when inspections should be created

A generation rule determines which template applies, but you must also determine when Quality Inspector should create the inspection.

Depending on the process, inspections can be created:

• Manually.
• When a purchase receipt is posted.
• As part of warehouse receiving.
• When production output is recorded.
• From assembly output.
• During warehouse movements or put-aways.
• On a recurring schedule.
• From other supported Quality Inspector triggers.

For receiving without advanced warehouse handling, see Create Quality Inspections for Receipts.

For manufacturing, use the production rule configuration described in Create a Production Rule in Quality Inspector.

For warehouse processes, inspections can also be associated with inventory movements and put-aways. See Create a Test Automatically with a Put-Away or Movement into a Bin in Quality Inspector.

For inspections that must occur periodically instead of as part of a transaction, see Configure Periodic Tests in Quality Inspector.

10. Configure sampling when required

Not every inspection needs to check every unit received or produced.

Quality Inspector supports several approaches to determining the quantity that should be inspected, including fixed sample quantities, percentage-based sampling, and configurable AQL sampling plans.

Configure sampling only when it is required by your quality process. For simple checklists, document reviews, or inspections where a single result represents the entire transaction, a sampling configuration may not be necessary.

Quality Inspector Setup provides access to Sample Size Configurations and AQL Sample Plan Configurations for organizations using formal sampling plans.

11. Configure inventory restrictions and disposition processes

If Quality Inspector is being used to control whether inventory can be consumed, transferred, shipped, or otherwise used, determine what should happen while an inspection is incomplete and after it receives a final grade.

Quality Inspector grades can be used to restrict transactions for tracked inventory. For example, you can configure a received lot so that it cannot be sold until its inspection has passed.

For an end-to-end example, see Automate Block and Unblock Lot Transactions in Quality Inspector.

Consider what should happen for each quality state:

• In Progress – Should the inventory remain available, or should some transactions be restricted while inspection is pending?
• Pass – Should all restrictions be released?
• Fail – Should the inventory be blocked, quarantined, moved, returned, adjusted, or subjected to another disposition process?

These decisions should be made before enabling automatic inventory restrictions in a production environment.

12. Configure Non-Conformance Reports when required

Quality Inspector includes Non-Conformance Reports (NCRs) for documenting and managing nonconforming material, products, or processes that require investigation or follow-up beyond the original Quality Inspection Test.

The Quality Inspector Setup Wizard includes steps for configuring NCR functionality. Configure NCRs when your quality process requires a separate non-conformance record to track information such as the issue, disposition, investigation, corrective action, or other follow-up activities associated with a failed inspection.

NCRs are optional. If your organization only needs to record a failed inspection or use simpler disposition processes such as blocking, moving, returning, or adjusting inventory, you do not necessarily need to implement NCRs.

If NCRs are part of your quality process, configure them during initial setup so that the appropriate NCR templates, fields, and related configuration are available before users begin processing nonconformances.

For configuration and usage details, see Non-Conformance Reports (NCRs) in Quality Inspector 7.26.

12. Configure workflows and automation where required

Quality Inspector can participate in Business Central workflows so that additional actions occur in response to quality events.

For example, a workflow can respond to an inspection event and update another Business Central record. The Set a Database Value in a Workflow Response article includes examples such as blocking an item or vendor based on quality events.

Enable Workflow Integration on Quality Inspector Setup only when workflows are part of the implementation.

Workflow automation is normally configured after the underlying templates, generation rules, grades, and inspection processes have been validated.

13. Choose how users will record inspection results

Determine where the people performing inspections will work.

Quality Inspector supports several interfaces, including:

• The full Business Central desktop interface.
• Business Central phone and tablet interfaces.
• Ruggedized devices through Warehouse Insight.
• Production data collection through Shop Floor Insight.
• Microsoft Teams and Power Automate for supported scenarios.
• Paper-based processes combined with Azure Document Intelligence.

Choose the interface based on where the inspection is performed and what the employee is already doing.

For example, a quality technician working primarily in Business Central may use the standard Quality Inspection Test page, while an operator performing an in-process inspection while recording manufacturing output may be better served by the Shop Floor Insight integration.

See Available User Interfaces for Recording Quality Inspections for a comparison of the available options.

14. Validate the configuration

Before using the configuration in production, test each inspection process from beginning to end using representative transactions.

For each scenario:

1. Create a transaction that should generate an inspection.
2. Perform the configured trigger, such as posting a receipt or production output.
3. Confirm that an inspection is created.
4. Confirm that the correct template was selected.
5. Confirm that source information such as the item, quantity, document number, location, and tracking information is correct.
6. Record both passing and failing values.
7. Confirm that each line receives the expected grade.
8. Finish the inspection and confirm the overall grade.
9. If inventory restrictions or workflows are configured, confirm the expected response for both passing and failing inspections.
10. Repeat the process with records that should not create an inspection to verify the generation-rule filters.

Testing both matching and nonmatching records is important. A generation rule that is too broad can create unwanted inspections just as easily as a rule that is too restrictive can fail to create required inspections.

Recommended implementation sequence

For a basic implementation or for demonstrating, start small:

1. Run the Quality Inspector Setup Wizard
2. Review and configure the grades.
3. Create a few inspection fields.
4. Create one template.
5. Create one generation rule for a controlled test scenario.  Use the wizards to help guide you with your decisions.
6. Create inspections manually and confirm that the template and grading behave as expected.
7. Enable the appropriate automatic trigger.
8. Test the complete Business Central transaction.
9. Add inventory restrictions, NCRs, workflows, sampling, and other automation only after the basic inspection process is working correctly.
10. Expand the configuration to additional items, categories, vendors, locations, production processes, or inspection types.

This approach makes it easier to identify whether unexpected behavior originates from the template, source configuration, generation rule, trigger, or downstream automation.

Related information

• Quality Inspector Setup – Configure company-wide Quality Inspector behavior and defaults.
• Configure Grades – Configure inspection grades, priorities, conditions, and visibility.
• Create Quality Inspections for Receipts – Complete example of configuring inspections for purchase receiving.
• Create a Test Generation Rule for a Specific Item in Quality Inspector – Apply a template to a particular item.
• Create a Test Generation Rule for a Category of Items in Quality Inspector – Apply a template to an item category.
• Create a Production Rule in Quality Inspector – Configure generation rules for production and assembly processes.
• Create a Test Automatically with a Put-Away or Movement into a Bin in Quality Inspector – Create inspections from warehouse movements or put-aways.
• Create an Ad Hoc Quality Inspection Test for an Item Already in Stock   – Create an ad-hoc inspection from existing warehouse inventory.
• Configure Periodic Tests in Quality Inspector – Schedule recurring quality inspections.
• Automate Block and Unblock Lot Transactions in Quality Inspector – Restrict tracked inventory based on inspection status and grade.
• Set a Database Value in a Workflow Response – Use Business Central workflows to respond to quality events.
• Available User Interfaces for Recording Quality Inspections – Choose an appropriate interface for inspectors, warehouse employees, and production operators.