Many food and beverage manufacturers still run quality management in a system that is separate from their ERP, and they pay for it in delays, blind spots, and process bottlenecks. NetSuite’s built-in Quality Management solution folds inspections, quarantine workflows, and reporting into the same platform, so quality data flows straight into day-to-day decisions.
An Overview of NetSuite ERP and Quality Management
For many food and beverage 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 food and beverage 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?
What is NetSuite Quality Management Solution
NetSuite’s Quality Management Benefits
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 NetSuite consultant about whether NetSuite Quality Management is a good fit for your organization.
Luxent Can Help You Find the Best Solution
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 food and beverage companies—and pain points. Reach out today to learn more about how LUXENT can transform your business with NetSuite.
ERP for food and beverage manages production scheduling, quality compliance, perishable inventory, multi-channel order management, and financial reporting in one platform. Instead of stitching together separate systems for production, quality, and fulfillment, NetSuite handles them together — configured for how F&B actually operates.
NetSuite provides inspection plans at every stage — receiving, in-process, and finished goods — with non-conformance tracking and lot traceability for recall readiness. Whether your framework is FSMA, SQF, or GFSI, Luxent configures the inspection, documentation, and traceability tools for your specific requirements.
Yes. Lot-tracked inventory carries expiration dates, FEFO logic drives fulfillment, and shelf-life alerts fire before product expires. Your warehouse automatically picks the lot expiring soonest — no manual overrides, no expired product sitting behind fresh stock.
Yes. NetSuite handles production scheduling and quality management alongside warehouse management, order fulfillment, and multi-channel distribution. Most F&B companies need both, and Luxent configures the manufacturing and distribution workflows in the same implementation.
One unified order-to-cash covers retail EDI, foodservice distributors, DTC ecommerce, and B2B portals, with channel-specific pricing, compliance, and fulfillment rules. It's one order management system for every channel — no reconciling across three different platforms at month-end.
Core financials typically go live in about 3 months; F&B manufacturing plus distribution usually runs 3 to 6 months. The timeline depends on production complexity, warehouse count, and integrations — we'll give you a real number on the first call.
The ROI shows up in three places: less waste through FEFO and shelf-life visibility, fewer compliance headaches through automated inspections, and faster multi-channel fulfillment. Replacing several disconnected tools with one system also lowers cost and gives you real-time financial visibility.
Bring quality management into NetSuite
Talk to our team about whether NetSuite Quality Management fits your food and beverage operation.
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