Stopping suspect stock from moving
Sometimes you need to freeze a lot - a failed test, a customer complaint, an investigation. Holding a lot (quarantine) blocks it from being consumed or shipped until quality clears it, without deleting or losing the stock.
Quarantine stock is the standard name for this: inventory that is on hand but not available. It still exists, it still has a cost, and it still occupies space. What it cannot do is leave.
When to quarantine
The trigger is usually one of six:
- A quality test fails, or a result is still pending
- A supplier delivery arrives damaged, mislabeled or off specification
- A customer complaint points back to a specific lot
- Contamination is suspected anywhere upstream of the lot
- A customer return comes back and has not been inspected yet
- An investigation is open and the lot is inside its scope
The common thread is doubt, not proof. Quarantine is what you do while you do not yet know, which is why hesitating to use it is the expensive mistake. Releasing a lot you should have held costs a recall; holding a lot you could have released costs a few days of working capital.
A status is not a sticker
Two different things get called quarantine, and only one of them stops anything.
A physical quarantine is tape, a marked pallet, a caged area. It tells people. A system status tells the software. If only the first exists, the lot is one distracted picker away from shipping, and the record of why it was held lives in somebody's memory.
In IEMSuite the status is the one that binds: a lot in Quarantine is refused by allocation, so it cannot be consumed by a production batch or shipped against an order regardless of what the shelf looks like. Do both anyway. The physical separation stops the wrong pallet being picked; the status stops the system picking it.
Lot statuses
Every lot has a status that controls whether it can be used:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Available | Cleared - can be consumed and shipped |
| Pending QC | Awaiting a quality decision |
| Quarantine | On hold - blocked from use |
| Rejected | Failed - not usable as sellable stock |
Step 1 - Put a lot on hold
From Inventory → Quality Control (or the lot itself), move the lot to Quarantine. It's now blocked from production and shipping. Consider moving it physically to a quarantine zone.
Step 2 - Decide its fate
- Cleared after inspection → release it back to Available.
- Confirmed bad → reject it so it can't be sold, and write it off.
Tie the decision to an inspection or NCR for a full record.
Rejected stock is not deleted. It stays in the system so the trail stays intact, which is what an auditor asks for: not that nothing ever failed, but that you can show what happened to the stock that did.
Do not let it sit
The failure mode of quarantine is not using it. It is forgetting it. A lot goes on hold in March, the investigation stalls, and by the time anyone looks it has expired anyway, so the decision makes itself and costs full price.
Quarantine is a temporary state by definition. Every held lot should have a name against it and a next step, and a quarantine area that only ever grows is a queue, not a control.
Where this sits in the wider process
Holding the stock is containment. It is the immediate action, and on its own it prevents nothing from happening again: see the difference between a correction and a corrective action. For how this fits beside the other tools sold as quality software, see quality control software for manufacturing.
If the hold came from a breached limit rather than a single failed lot, the harder question is scope. Which batches ran while the process was out of limit, and where did they go. That is the trace, not the hold: tracing a recall back to the supplier follows it through.
FAQ
Can a quarantined lot still be shipped by mistake?
No - quarantine blocks the lot from being consumed or shipped until it's released.
What's the difference between Quarantine and Rejected?
Quarantine is a temporary hold pending a decision; Rejected is the final outcome for stock that failed.