Hello Kiran,
Quality Notification is indeed a great functionality and has much flexibility as well. You can customize a new notification type and make use of the tasks wisely as Arijit pointed out to suit this to your requirement.
There is no specific rule from where the process should start. Some organizations they create notification first and based on that they create return orders while others first inward the material and then do analysis. It all depends on how your organization operates physically and in which sequence. You should replicate the same processes in SAP. For your case I think this could be something like this
- If somebody is first getting informed that the customer is unhappy and wishes for the replacement of the product then the so called person or agency would create a notification (may be you can customize specifically for this purpose) first in system. Here the person would enter the nature of complaint and other details such as batch number as conveyed by customer.
- The same notification will be investigated further and immediate tasks would be initiated. Like a visit by your representative to customer site to verify the issue. This person will update the comments against the same notification on what he / she did there to verify the complaint.
- Based on above inspection if it decided that the product is faulty and needs to be replaced then you assign the new task in the same notification to different user to take this material in your stores.
- Subsequently further processes in SD module will start and every time you complete the any such tasks you should go on updating the same in the same notification to have tracking till it reaches to DC or the last node.
- And, it further offers a customized workflow as well, with which you can send emails to the next task processor on what he or she is supposed to do or at what stage the notification is
This is one way in which you can use notification functionality to document the details.
Another or next further role of QM comes when the actual material is returned. Refer the link Arijit provided for 06 inspection type . This is useful mainly when you want to have detailed why why analysis for the customer complaint. Combination of above 2 can also exist simultaneously.
Another point that you mentioned is vendor evaluation. Well, this is also again a vast topic but I am sure link quality notifications as one of the factors for rating the vendor. The only thing that I think you need to take care is you should raise a separate notification for vendor and the product that he supplies. I would suggest to have search on this link as it would be bit difficult to explain in this thread. I apologies for that!
MM Vendor Evaluation - SAP Library
Anand