Dear SAP QM Community,

Successful companies never stop improving their product and services quality –  because high quality products and services can result in customer loyalty, repeat purchases, upsell and advocacy – and finally of course to growing business figures.

However, delivering high-quality products requires to learn from quality issues in the past.
These Quality Issues can occur at all stages in your supply chain. You may detect them during goods receipt, during production or even later once your customer is using your product.

Once detected, it is utmost important to have processes in place that allow to properly track, analyze and solve this quality issue. Therefore, Problem-Solving Methodologies such as 8D, help analyzing and resolving issues in a standardized way – on a short and long-term perspective.

8D is based on eight dimensions to identify, correct, eliminate reoccurring quality issues as well as to improve overall process and product quality and to reduce cost.

One thing that makes a problem-solving process especially challenging is that quality issues can occur at different stages along the value chain and the required collaboration with internal and external stakeholders (e.g. suppliers or customers) happens offline and often in silos.

SAP Quality Issue Resolution (formerly known as SAP Supplier Problem-Solving) is the collaboration space for companies working on standardized problem-solving processes with internal and external stakeholders.

As of August 2022 the solution supports:

• Guidance through structured problem-solving following the 8D methodology
• Covered business scenarios: Supplier 8D and customer 8D
• Collaboration capabilities along the problem-solving process including comments and review actions.
• Method based root cause analysis using 5Why
• Task handling capabilities for follow-up actions
• Status indicators and e-mail notification to provide transparency for everyone involved as well as to ensure 8D completion in time and quality
• Easy on-boarding of external stakeholders
• A tight integration with SAP’s quality management module ensures a systematic and seamless end-to-end process

Problem-solving process overview including status indicators on overall process and process step level.

Detailed view on process step level.

If you are interested to find out more, visit SAP Store or SAP Help Portal.

There is a lot more to come – so stay tuned, we will keep you posted!

And always remember: Quality is when the customer comes back – not the product.

Cheers!

Julia Quintel

Solution Manager, Industry Business Unit Automotive.