QALS table — QALS Inspection Lot Header Table

Each row in QALS is one inspection lot: a discrete unit of inspection work created automatically or manually against a material, batch, plant and process step. A lot is created for a goods receipt, an in-process check, a goods issue, a stock transfer, a manual audit, or a QM order, among other origins, and the ART field records which. The row carries the lot quantity, the material and plant it belongs to, the batch if the material is batch-managed, the creation date, and a pointer (the object number) into the general status management framework rather than a plain status field. QALS does not hold the results of the inspection or the usage decision itself; it is the anchor row that everything else in the inspection lot lifecycle hangs off.

QALS is client-dependent and grows continuously in any live QM setup, so an unrestricted select against it in a production system is a bad idea. Always restrict on WERK and MATNR first, then narrow by ART if the question is about a specific origin type (goods receipt lots behave very differently from in-process or audit lots), and add a date range on ERSTELLDAT for anything beyond a handful of materials. PRUEFLOS is the most selective single field but is rarely known up front; MATNR plus WERK plus ART is the practical entry point for most investigations. Do not try to read a status directly from QALS: there is no simple open/closed field, and any apparent status-like value found by guessing at field names is not reliable.

Symptom: a goods receipt is blocked in stock in quality inspection and the business wants to know why. Select QALS on WERK, MATNR and ART equal to the goods-receipt origin, sorted descending on ERSTELLDAT, to find the open lot. Take its PRUEFLOS, then check JEST via OBJNR to confirm the lot has not yet reached a completed status, and check QAVE on the same PRUEFLOS to confirm no usage decision has been posted. If QAVE has a row, the lot is decided and the stock block is coming from somewhere else, not from an open inspection lot.

QALS is retained as a standard transparent table in S/4HANA with the same structure and role it had in ECC; there is no compatibility view replacing it and no restructuring specific to the inspection lot header. The surrounding QM process (lot creation, results recording, usage decision) is functionally unchanged, though some Fiori-based inspection apps present the same data through their own OData services rather than direct table access. For custom reporting, direct reads against QALS remain valid on S/4HANA.

Data questions on QALS belong to the QM consultant or quality engineer responsible for the inspection lot configuration, specifically the control key and inspection type setup that decides when lots get created. MM or PP consultants raise the symptom (stock stuck in quality inspection, a receipt that will not post), but the explanation almost always traces back to QM configuration or an open lot that QM owns.

QAVE carries the usage decision made against a lot. The characteristics results and catalog structures (code group and code tables such as QPGR and QPCD, and catalog type table QPCT) supply the defect codes and usage decision codes recorded against a lot. A quality notification created from a rejected lot lands in QMEL with its items in QMFE, causes in QMUR and tasks in QMMA. Lots are created and processed through the standard inspection lot transactions (creation, processing, results recording and usage decision), and inspection planning data referenced by a lot comes from the task list characteristic tables.