Get to Know Certificate of Analysis

Certificate of Analysis (COA) is a document issued by Quality Assurance to confirm that a regulated item meets its quality specifications. With countless items being produced by manufacturers, it is often difficult for a company to seamlessly track materials quality used in the production. This means that companies rely more and more on their suppliers to provide quality materials for finished products.

A COA goes beyond a mere identity for product inspection as well. With materials rapidly moving to and from different locations, it is necessary to have the products to be correctly identified and clarified. In addition to material and container labels, the COA serves as an identification document for the status of each product. A COA includes the inspection results from the quality control tests for an individual item batch or lot.

In NetSuite, COA is available only for quality inspections with a Sampling Requirement set to Simple Sampling. NetSuite COA is included as a support for lot controlled items only. Best believe that the whole document creation is not done manually; NatSuite has the ability to automatically generate a detailed COA for each fulfilled item. However, the use of it is limited within Quality Management feature, which mandates you to install the Quality Management bundle before using COA.

Leveraging more benefits of generating COA in NetSuite is the ability to customize the final format of your document if you are holding and administrator role. NetSuite allows to save a COA in different formats such as PDF or format that best to suit your organisation needs. The final COA report will be generated in the following details:

• Transaction Details – The item fulfillment number of the generated COA report.

• Parent Transaction – The sales order number of the generated COA report.

• Lot Number – The specific lot number.

• Lot Quantity – The quantity in the lot.

The COA report also contains a table with the inspection results and the inspection criteria. You can compare the data to confirm that a regulated item meets its quality specifications.

Making a COA in NetSuite

To generate a Certificate of Analysis (COA) report, you must first define a COA field. When you define a COA field, you specify an applicable data field with criteria to inspect for a COA. Defining a COA field can be done in following steps:

1. Go to Customization > Lists, Records, & Fields > Record Types.

2. In the Quality Inspection Fields List row, click New Record.

3. Enter a quality inspection fields list record Name.

4. If you do not want this inspection field to appear in search lists and forms, check the Inactive box.

5. Select a Data Type for the data field:

• Text – stores any kind of text data.

• Integer – the most common numeric data type used to store numbers without a fractional component.

• Decimal – provides an exact numeric in which the precision and scale can be arbitrarily sized.

• Date – stores a date in the YYYY-MM-DD format.

• DateTime – stores a value containing both date and time together in the YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss format.

• Boolean – represents the values true and false. It can also be represented as 0 (for false) and 1 (for true).

• Image – store or refers to any type of image file. For example, .jpg, .bmp, or .png.

• Select – represents a pre-defined list of string values that you can select from during data entry.

• URL – captures an external URL for later navigation.

6. To make this a required inspection field, check the Mandatory box.

7. To identify whether the data field applies to each inspection or to each sample, check the Sampling Summary Field box.

8. To enable the field for COA, check the Certificate of Analysis (COA) Field box, and then enter the COA Criteria.

9. Save the customized COA template.

By default, all COA fields and COA criteria apply to all items and customers. If you want to define a customer-specific COA attribute for an item, complete Defining a Customer Certificate of Analysis (COA) Attribute, or contact your trusted partner to help you with the procedure.

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