QAD Prague user conference shows manufacturing ERP developer in new light

Customers at its ’06 Europe, Middle East and Africa user group conference last week in Prague seemed upbeat and positive about their choice of system vendor in a way reminiscent of the best of the Mapics days. Why? There’s no magic: QAD just seems remarkably in touch with its users – for example, driving developments with them and making upgrades attractive by focusing on reducing customisations, complexity and cost. QAD is currently spending $36 million on R&D per year – small compared to SAP, for example, but significant enough for its size and clearly well aimed. Prospective users at the event, still in the final throes of scoring their shortlists, were picking up on the club atmosphere and seemed genuinely impressed. As one put it: “There may not be the razzmatazz here, but these people clearly understand manufacturing business today and are talking a lot of sense with their roadmap.” QAD’s big mission statement is enabling efficiency, agility and competitiveness through ‘the perfect lean market’ – with QAD chairman and president Pam Lopker using the NIST definition of lean to establish its essential supply chain scope today. Lopker believes getting there for manufacturers is about facilitating five fundamental requirements: automation, connectivity, collaboration, standards and systems. She believes that everything from barcodes and RFID on the automation side, to Internet-based comms and hi-tech systems geared to demand-driven mass customisation are the keys to achieving manufacturing’s ‘perfect lean’ objective. On the system side, she says QAD’s eB2.1 is a lean enabler, not least at the technology level since it’s now able to support a single instance, multi-domain, multi-site, multi-country architecture – with the cost and efficiency gains that implies. It also runs on more and better platforms, notably Linux, Unix and Windows (with plans to upgrade to Vista in due course) on the server side, and Oracle and SQL Server 2005 for the database – the latter an initial result of QAD’s closer partnership with Microsoft. “Our latest software is designed to give multi-national manufacturers the ability to identify and act quickly on local opportunities, while maintaining a global standard of demand fulfilment and operational efficiency,” says Lopker. “As we deliver on our commitment to the demand-driven manufacturing enterprise, it’s gratifying to extend the capabilities of our solutions without adding complexity, as well as to make progress on our vision of a perfect lean market by helping to streamline the manufacturing supply chain.” Teasing out some of the detail on her latter points, QAD GXE (Global Enterprise Edition suite) has changed significantly. For example, it now has an all new Microsoft .Net-based user interface that also integrates with the Office products. There’s also a new production scheduler workbench claimed to cut workloads by 85%, and additional software to improve on collaborative demand management. There are also other technology additions – for example, web-based product configuration, distributed order management and portal-based collaborative forecasting, and it’s all now double byte-enabled for language coverage. And there are specific enhancements in terms of financial management and business compliance, as well as analytics through its Cognos partnership. “This technology will underpin our applications for the next 10 years: it means a significant change in capability,” says Lopker. GXS’ scope is also being significantly rounded out as a result of QAD’s recent acquisitions, notably with CRM technology from BizGen, transportation management via Precision Software, and enterprise asset management with FBO Systems. Beyond these, there are improvements that have to do with QAD’s deep industry involvement in its chosen industry verticals, which include industrial electronics, automotive, consumer goods and food. In automotive, for example, QAD has been working on the MMOG/LE (Materials Management Operation Guideline Logistics Evaluation) update committee, simplifying the path to compliance based on the prescribed materials management principles from the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) in North America and Odette in Europe. It’s a similar story in MES (manufacturing execution systems), with developments aimed at zero defects planning and execution following work on JIT sequencing with Johnson Controls. QAD also appears to be broadening the scope and appeal of its application management services (AMS) – what Lopker refers to as “off premise” implementations, where QAD takes responsibility for data centre operations, version control and support. Despite many of the ERP vendors still talking of this as a future requirement, QAD can claim significant success – with, for example, HP Indigo, Bobst Group and Kraft as current users. Challenges for QAD going forward: apart from the obvious need to consolidate and integrate its recent clutch of acquisitions, the company believes it needs to expand its AMS offering, focus on delivering its upgrades and capitalise on the lean and JIT supply chain extension offerings. This organisation clearly doesn’t have the size and muscle of its big-hitting competitors, but what it lacks in that direction it more than makes up for in good old focused hard work and pragmatism. One to take very seriously.