Most quality programs run on hindsight. A batch fails, someone scrambles to figure out why, and the fix arrives after the damage is done. Advanced Quality Management in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is built to flip that order, to catch problems earlier, document them properly, and keep them from coming back.
This Dynamics 365 advanced quality management overview walks through what the feature set actually does, who it’s for, and how to start using it. For the short version, watch our conversation with Gunnar Myers below.
Quality management has been part of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for a long time, but it was fairly basic. It handled pass/fail checks well enough and not much beyond that. The formal processes that regulated and quality-driven businesses depend on, structured improvement workflows, audit-ready records, flexible testing, weren’t really there.
Advanced Quality Management (AQM) closes that gap. It moves quality from reactive checks to continuous, auditable, compliant workflows wired into the rest of your supply chain. The payoff is lower risk, less rework, and lower cost, because issues get caught and corrected before they spread instead of after.
The feature suite is designed around regulatory standards that quality teams already know, FDA Quality System Regulation, 21 CFR Part 11, current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP), ISO, and Six Sigma, so the workflows map to requirements you may already be audited against.
AQM is a suite rather than a single tool. The pieces most teams will care about first:
A few of these deserve a closer look.
CAPA is the piece that turns quality from a checklist into a discipline. It’s a formal, structured workflow for handling significant quality issues, not just fixing a bad batch, but figuring out why it was bad and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
It’s used across manufacturing and retail, but it’s a core requirement for standards like ISO 9001 and for regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals and life sciences, where documenting root cause and preventive action isn’t optional. If you’re audited on how you respond to defects, CAPA gives you a repeatable system instead of a scramble.
This is where AQM gets genuinely practical for high-volume operations. Flexible sampling plans let the system adjust how many items get inspected and which tests run, automatically, based on a vendor’s or item’s track record. Three things drive it: sampling-size variation that reduces inspections over time, skip-lot testing that drops unnecessary checks, and test-group flexibility that dials testing rigor up or down as performance changes. Those adjustments apply automatically as an item, vendor, or production order moves through its stages, a quality association references a flexible sampling plan code to decide what level of inspection is needed.
Here’s how a three-level plan might behave in practice:
The plan tightens back up the moment quality slips. A single failure at Level 30 drops the next inbound order back to Level 20 criteria; a failure at Level 20 drops the next order to Level 10. On top of that, a failure at Level 20 or Level 10 can trigger an alert to the quality control clerk. So a trusted vendor earns lighter, cheaper inspections, but a slip immediately restores scrutiny, without anyone managing it by hand.
AQM scales from simple to intense, so there’s something in it for most operations. It’s especially valuable for food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, and any business that relies on batch-tracked items, where safety, consistency, and compliance are non-negotiable. The configurable sampling, customer-specific certificates of analysis, and end-to-end traceability are built for exactly those environments.
The short test: if quality affects your brand, your compliance posture, or product safety, advanced quality management in Dynamics 365 is worth a look.
The sensible path is phased, not all-at-once. Start by turning on quality triggers for the transaction types that matter most, purchase orders, production orders, then set up a basic sampling plan and begin logging non-conformances in the system. Once that process is stable and the team is comfortable with it, layer in the heavier capabilities like CAPA for critical failures and electronic batch records. The phased approach builds confidence and momentum instead of overwhelming the team on day one.
One note on timing: AQM was introduced in version 10.0.44 and has been turned on by default since 10.0.47, so it’s now generally available rather than in preview. Microsoft continues to refine it across releases, so it’s worth keeping an eye on each release wave for new capabilities.
Advanced Quality Management takes quality from checking boxes to actually improving your processes, sampling plans that adapt, audit trails that hold up, and a structured way to fix root causes for good. That’s the shift from quality as a cost center to quality as a competitive edge.
Reach out to the Sunrise team, we’ll help you map the rollout to what your industry actually needs.