QAD expands Channel Islands and enhances solutions

QAD Inc., provider of enterprise software and services for global manufacturing companies, announces the availability of the next phase of its Channel Islands initiative and key enhancements to several of its solutions.

The Channel Islands initiative provides customers with an attractive, intuitive, device-independent user experience personalised for roles, tasks and each user. The latest version, referred to as Santa Cruz 2, adds a number of new roles, business services, browses and reports. The highlight of Santa Cruz 2 is new Action Centers which combine advanced embedded analytics and social collaboration to help manufacturing executives and managers better run their business and operations.

“Manufacturers increasingly need real-time, actionable insights into their customers, operations and supply chain and the ability to then rapidly respond to optimise business outcomes,” said Bill Keese, senior vice president of research and development at QAD. “Action Centers, which combine leading analytics technology with collaboration and role-based tasks, provide manufacturing managers an intuitive user experience to help increase their effectiveness.”

The initial Action Centers are designed for Chief Financial Officers, Purchasing Managers and Customer Service Managers. Santa Cruz 2 also adds comprehensive notification and approval capabilities for QAD Cloud ERP users across all popular browsers, tablets with full touch support and natively on smartphones.

Keese stated, “We also added a number of other functional enhancements across our solutions spectrum. We are laser focused on continuous improvement across all our solutions.” Specific enhancements include:

• For Channel Islands users, QAD Financials now include automated exchange rate integration from multiple foreign exchange rate information carriers.

• QAD’s Internationalization program, which tracks and adds features to support country and local regulatory changes for financial reporting and taxation purposes, was updated for 11 countries. QAD supports 69 countries and offers special country extensions for many more.

• QAD Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) enhanced the requisition approval, requisition create and release to purchase order processes using the Channel Islands user experience.

• QAD Trade Activity Management (TAM) 2.0, available later in October 2016, received several functional enhancements and will run on the Channel Islands architecture.

• A new version of QAD QMS (quality management system) provides 10 new fully functional, pre-configured process templates. These templates cover all the processes that make up a QMS system and enable more rapid implementation.

• QAD extended its Unique Device Identifier (UDI) solution to include QAD QMS and QAD Automation Solutions, enabling medical device customers to better track, audit and report medical device genealogy information to comply with Food and Drug Administration UDI requirements.