Channel Partner Blog
19 August 2026
Business Central now ships with built-in Quality Management — inspections, quarantine, and certificates baked right into your receiving and production processes.
Every business that makes or moves physical goods has had the nightmare: a sub-standard batch slips through, reaches a customer, and turns into a complaint, a recall, or a lost account. In food, beverage, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing businesses, quality is not a nice-to-have — it is the licence to operate, often with regulators watching.
Until now, many Business Central customers handled quality control on the side: a paper checklist on the receiving dock, a spreadsheet of test results, a separate bolt-on app. With the 2026 Wave 1 release, that changes — Microsoft has introduced Quality Management, a built-in quality inspection application that puts inspections, quarantine, and certificates directly inside Business Central's purchasing, production, assembly, and warehouse processes.
What Quality Management Does
Quality Management is a Microsoft-published extension that installs automatically on new environments (and is available from the Extension Management page or Marketplace for existing ones). It lets you build quality checks into the key moments where quality actually matters:
Inspections, triggered your way. Generate inspections automatically when you receive a purchase order, post production or assembly output, or process a warehouse movement — or create them manually, or on a schedule via job queues.
Templates and pass/fail criteria. Use predefined inspection templates with customisable measurements — weight, dimensions, density — and clear pass/fail criteria.
Block non-compliant lots. Automatically block inventory lots based on inspection results, so a failed batch cannot be sold or consumed by mistake.
Handle the failures cleanly. Move items to quarantine bins, make negative adjustments for disposal, transfer to another location, or raise a purchase return to the vendor.
Workflow integration. Configure automated responses to inspection results, and warehouse support for locations with or without warehouse handling.
The Compliance Payoff
Beyond catching defects, Quality Management produces the documentation that regulated and quality-conscious customers demand:
Quality certificates that verify the quality and safety of products and demonstrate compliance with standards.
Certificates of analysis detailing the composition and quality of a product — often required for regulatory compliance.
Quality status and orders overviews so stakeholders can see current quality levels, open issues, and whether each batch meets customer requirements.
Microsoft's framing is direct: including quality checks in receiving and production improves product reliability and builds customer confidence — while helping you comply with industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Before and After: A Food Producer in Cape Town
Before: Incoming ingredients are checked against a clipboard, results live in a spreadsheet, and there is no hard link between a failed test and the inventory it relates to. A borderline batch occasionally gets used because nobody flagged it in the system, and assembling a certificate of analysis for a retail customer is a manual scramble.
After: When ingredients are received, Business Central generates an inspection automatically. A failed lot is blocked and routed to a quarantine bin — it physically cannot be consumed in production until released. When the retailer asks for a certificate of analysis, it is generated from the inspection data in moments. Quality is enforced by the system, not by memory.
At a glance
Feature: Quality Management — a built-in quality inspection extension
Availability: Introduced in 2026 Release Wave 1; general availability 1 April 2026
Install: Automatic on new environments; via Extension Management or Marketplace on existing ones
Inspection points: Purchase receipts, production output, assembly output, warehouse, manual, and scheduled
Note: Production capabilities require the Premium experience; roles include Quality Inspector, Supervisor, and Auditor
Why Resellers Should Take Note
For CSP resellers and partners, Quality Management opens the door to quality-critical industries — food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, manufacturing — where a credible quality system is often a precondition for doing business at all. Many of these customers are running quality on paper or on a third-party add-on. Helping them configure native Quality Management — inspection templates, generation rules, quarantine procedures, workflows, and the right permission roles (Inspector, Supervisor, Auditor) — is exactly the kind of industry-specific, high-value engagement that wins and keeps customers. It also pairs naturally with the subcontracting and supply-chain capabilities in the same release.
Bringing quality control into the core ERP — rather than leaving it on a clipboard beside the receiving door — reflects Business Central's growing seriousness as an operations platform. For African manufacturers and producers competing on quality and chasing export-grade compliance, having inspections, quarantine, and certificates built in is a genuinely meaningful capability to have on hand.
Let's Talk
If your business makes or handles physical goods and quality compliance matters — to your customers, your regulators, or both — built-in Quality Management is worth a close look. 4Sight's Dynamics Africa Services team can configure inspection templates, quarantine procedures, and certificates around your specific products and standards.
Contact us on: channel@4sight.cloud
Book a Quality Management setup consultation with 4Sight.
References
[1] Quality management overview — Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/qms-overview
[2] Evaluate the quality of goods and materials (release plan) — Microsoft Learn
[3] Quality management setup and configuration — Microsoft Learn
learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/qms-setup
