What Outbound Certificates with SAP functionality can offer your company is a better way to integrate SAP QM with Sales and Distribution (SD) during Certificate of Analysis (COA) generation. The COA is a document which is sent with the deliveries based on customer request or regulatory needs as a proof of conformance to pre-defined specifications.
The COA can be generated in SAP from the results of a quality inspection and/or from attributes maintained in batch master record. Certificate Profile defines the format/layout of the COA, which tests should appear on a given COA, what information is printed for each test, and where that information is pulled from inside your SAP system. To create a COA your company would start by looking at the Inspection Plans for what Inspection Characteristics would be pulled into the COA. Within the Inspection Plans are the Operations, and inside each Operation would be at least 1 Inspection Characteristic (or a test). Then the Certificate Profiles are linked to a FORM (a layout) used to pull and place information in specific areas of the layout which SAP uses to generate the COA. Generally, a FORM is developed once and shared by many Certificate Profiles; to have information added or removed will require a different FORM to be created. These Certificate Profiles are then built by adding only the inspection characteristics that need to be printed out on the COA. At the end of the process you will have an outbound certificate generated by SAP that is exactly what you need to help integrate SAP QM with SD during the COA generation process.