QAD Enterprise Platform
Manufacturers that want to grow through unprecedented change need adaptive solutions fit for today and tomorrow that include:
- Rapid app development for creating and deploying cloud applications quickly and easily using out-of-the-box tools and services.
- Consistent user experience across all apps to leverage the full capabilities whether they are core or extended by your team
- Reduced complexity and risk around data by eliminating the need for spreadsheets and fragile integrations with home-grown point solutions
- Improved agility that reduces long-term rigidity, allowing for future enhancements and upgrades without complications.
Capabilities
- Rapid Personalization
- Embedded Analytics
- Easy Extensibility
- Robust New Apps
Enterprise Platform
Global manufacturers constantly deal with market disruptions in their business environments. Difficult to predict customer demand, emerging technologies, regulatory shifts, volatile geopolitics and unstable supply chains all contribute to turbulence that affect manufacturing industries. Manufacturers that adapt rapidly manage risk more successfully than competitors and are able to take advantage of emerging market opportunities.
An ERP with a brittle user experience, outdated architecture and weak integration capabilities makes it difficult to modernize business processes, meet user preferences and adopt advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence. Manufacturers looking for agility to better execute on their strategy need ERP that adapts and extends quickly to changing requirements. A flexible ERP supports a manufacturer’s specific requirements that contribute to market differentiation.
How can a manufacturer future-proof an ERP’s user experience, business processes and decision-making capabilities to respond rapidly to a shifting business environment? What ensures that ERP and related solutions meet a manufacturer’s evolving requirements without creating solution rigidity?
Benefits
The QAD Enterprise Platform helps manufacturers effectively address changing business and user requirements. It provides a consistent model to extend, modify and add capabilities, data and processes. It simplifies upgrades and the adoption of advanced technologies. It provides QAD Adaptive ERP and other solutions in the QAD Adaptive Applications portfolio the core capabilities to help manufacturers digitize their operations, production, customer experience and supply chains.
Enhance user productivity by providing a device-independent yet consistent user experience with personalization that supports changing roles, workforces and user preferences
Gain share and reduce costs by accelerating digital transformation
Gain real-time business insight for better decision-making and key performance measurement with self-service embedded analytics, sophisticated KPI tools and a data lake to support complex queries and data discovery
Meet manufacturer-specific business requirements by quickly addressing last-mile fit through powerful, unintrusive extensions to help meet changing business priorities, processes and data needs
Stay current with advanced technologies, compliance changes and business process enhancements by upgrading to new versions quickly and dependably while preserving previously developed extensions
Solution
The QAD Enterprise Platform includes a set of layered services, referred to as Foundation Services and Core Model, that span the needs of a modern cloud and web/mobile manufacturing ERP and supply chain solutions.
Foundation Services provides a comprehensive set of services for infrastructure management, platform management and application development that ensure reliability, availability, security and ease-of-use.
Infrastructure Management handles configurations and related capabilities across deployments and network management. It provides services for infrastructure provisioning and disaster recovery. It ensures that apps can be developed, deployed and run without regard for the underlying infrastructure.
Platform Management simplifies application lifecycle management for apps based on the QAD Enterprise Platform. It includes tools that help with the development, deployment, management and promotion of apps and configuration settings from one system or instance to another. This includes a web-based integrated development environment for building apps and tools for automated testing and code management. It also includes tools to build and manage development forums and documentation.
Platform Services provide development/deployment technology services for app development, including User Experience, Mobile, Security, Integration, API Management, Analytics, Data Query, Browse, Globalization, Collaboration and Event/Task Scheduling. By centralizing Platform Services, apps across the platform deliver a consistent user experience and can leverage the full technology capabilities that underpin QAD ERP. Enhancements to Platform Services are instantly available for use by all apps.
Core Model builds on the concept of Foundation Services by providing higher level shareable business components related to master data. Core Model provides the ability to seamlessly blend and share information across the platform, effectively delivering a single version of the truth while reducing the number of data integrations. Services provided by Core Model include: Domain Entity, Address, Customer/Supplier, Attributes, Chart of Accounts, Calendar, Currency and Exchange Rates, Daybook, Item and Site, Codes and Global Tax Management.
Rapid Response Technologies QAD Enterprise Platform, applying Foundation Services and Core Model, provides users and developers four primary technologies that support a rapid response to change.
Personalization: Supports self-service modification of a user’s screens and attributes using a simple graphical point and click interface
Embedded self-service analytics: Delivers insight in the context of business processes, data and roles to decision-makers who can rapidly create and modify analytic models, reports, KPIs and dashboards. It also supports custom alerts for notification of out of tolerance events.
Extensibility: Add or modify functions and data without rewriting the entire app and without interfering with future upgrades by adding extension apps.
Integration: Delivers a consistent, secure API layer exposing standards-based data maintenance and business services
The rapid response technologies of the QAD Enterprise Platform are designed to meet the changing requirements of manufacturers efficiently and effectively. They allow manufacturers to maximize the return on their ERP investment by achieving better levels of fit to required business processes, ensuring improved operational, management and strategy alignment now and into the future.
