QAD, a provider of enterprise applications for global manufacturing companies specializing in automotive, consumer products, electronics, food and beverage, industrial, and life sciences products, recently announced that the Automotive Edition of QAD Enterprise Applications has greater market share in China than any other ERP solution, according to the IDC report “China Automotive Industry IT Solutions 2012–2016 Forecast and Analysis”. Of the top five ERP providers in China, QAD was the 2011 automotive industry leader ahead of SAP, UFIDA, Infor, and Siemens.

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I am quite familiar with the Russian auto industry, and thus I enjoyed analyzing the transaction that recently took place involving a big player in the automobile industry in Russian manufacturing hub Togliatti, whereby automotive industry supplier, Russia-based Saturno-TP, became a client of ERP software vendor QAD (also see yesterday’s TEC blog post).

Despite global industry depression, the automobile manufacturing industry in Russia is developing at an extremely fast pace, only comparable with China and a small number of other Asian countries. All major global auto manufacturers already established their assembly plants in the country three to six years ago, and now it is time for their parts and components suppliers from around the world to roll out their manufacturing facilities in Russia too. Although there is an advantage that comes with being local, Russian auto suppliers are experiencing tremendous pressure from car manufacturers with regards to quality and compliance with world-level standards in manufacturing and logistics business processes. This is quite a painful process overall that is quite well suited to the advantages that ERP software can provide; adopting a world-class ERP system would allow managing a company according to global manufacturing standards of the industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Sharp vertical focus is helping QAD win in the Russian market against the fierce local competitor 1C. QAD recently announced Saturno-TP, a manufacturer of interior auto parts, selected QAD Enterprise Applications to support its manufacturing operations. Saturno-TP is an automotive parts supplier focused on the development and production of interior parts such as interior trims, door panels, parcel shelves, pillars and other injection-molded and thermoformed parts, luggage compartment components, and sun visors. Read the rest of this entry »

QAD Inc. continues to gain new customers via its relatively autonomous divisions, such as Precision Software for transportation management, and the recently acquired DynaSys for supply chain management (SCM) and CEBOS for quality management. QAD expects all of those products to carry their own weight and continue to sell to non-QAD enterprise resource planning (ERP) customers (in addition to cross-selling to QAD ERP customers).

Most recently, DynaSys, a division that provides solutions for demand and supply chain planning, announced that the RAJA Group has implemented DynaSys n.SKEP Retail Planning to help its growth strategy. The European distributor of packaging, business supplies, and consumables deployed DynaSys n.SKEP Retail Planning “Ready To Plan” (RTP) solution as part of its plan to upgrade its IT systems.

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Ongoing mergers in the enterprise applications continue to make strange bedfellows of fierce competitors. Most recently, Precision Software, a transportation and global trade management (GTM) division of QAD and a Gold level member of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN), announced that it has achieved Oracle Validated Integration of Precision Software Transportation Management System (TMS) Parcel v2012 with Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) 6.2. Needless to say, QAD and Oracle do compete in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) arena, but Precision Software has had autonomy with regard to its marketing activities and partnerships. Precision’s strategy includes integration with all the major ERP players, and QAD will not object to some money for the caviar coming from its competitors. Read the rest of this entry »

QAD is arguably the first enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor with a built-in full-fledged business process management (BPM) system (Savvion BPM) within its development platform, Progress OpenEdge. Indeed, SAP NetWeaver PI is mainly about process-based integration (and Pegasystems, IBM BPM, and IDS Scheer by Software AG often complement those capabilities for, say, case management or rules-based processes), while Microsoft SharePoint has some workflow management capabilities and is mostly good for document-based processes. Needless to say, BPM is about much more than system-centric integration, portals, and document management. Read the rest of this entry »

It is hard to think of any ERP vendor that has as much cred in the automotive industry as QAD does, owing to its longstanding involvement in the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and its standards and guidelines development. Read the rest of this entry »

SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

Jeanswest selects Manhattan Associates
Industry tags: Fashion/retail
“Manhattan Associates once again shows the strength of its SCALE platform; Jeanswest was in much need of a supply chain solution that could help them streamline logistics across and between three continents. Jeanswest will now be able to better manage its operations across its branded stores and distribution center, while establishing a more efficient framework to support its extended supply chain.”—Philippe Reney, TEC Research Analyst

• Manhattan Associates: TEC profile

Another instance of UNIT4-based ERP shared service goes live for several UK local authorities
Industry tags: Public administration and defense
“Since I am already a bit familiar with UNIT4’s shared-services projects and have spoken to few key people from client’s side, I realize how challenging they can be. The issues have less to do with the technology (which is impressive), or the hardware, than with challenges that are internal to the clients themselves, whether it be political/economic hurdles, or even end users’ and top management’s psychological readiness to use shared back-office software. In view of all this, my congratulations to UNIT4’s team and, certainly, to the local authorities in the UK that made this project a reality.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• UNIT4: TEC profile

Standby Screw Machine Products Co. replaces five old systems with IQMS ERP
Industry tags: Manufacturing
This contract parts company, which owns two manufacturing facilities in the US and China, will replace its five disparate and aged applications with a single modern system that should help it consolidate all company data and eliminate difficulties caused by multiple systems. Another consideration was that the company wanted to acquire industry-specific ERP software that included industry best practices. Among eight vendors, IQMS was judged by Standby Screw Machine as offering the best fit for its needs.”—Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst

• IQMS: TEC profile
• Compare IQMS to leading competitors

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Part 1 of this blog series talked about my recent reunion with Cameleon Software (formerly Access Commerce) a provider of on-demand and on-premises configure, price, and quote (CPQ)/quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions. Prior to analyzing the recent events at Cameleon, Part 1 first established the need and market drivers for such software solutions.

I then analyzed how Cameleon helps product managers and marketers during the design phase of new product and service offerings, with the focus on being amenable to business (vs. power IT) users in these departments. Part 2 continues with the analyses of how Cameleon helps the sales process (often via multiple channels) and a discussion of recent developments at Cameleon. 

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In this fast-moving world, use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing has grown rapidly owing to its straightforward subscription-based pricing model and relatively quick deployment. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the niche quote-to-order (Q2O) or configure, price & quote (CPQ) market segment. Indeed, BigMachines, FPX (formerly Firepond), Webcom, and Experlogix continue to report notable on-demand software subscription and accounts growth even during these economically depressed days. 

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The software as a service (SaaS) model is now mainstream in many functional areas of business, quite outperforming its on-premise counterpart in this tough economic environment. Consider customer relationship management (CRM), transportation management, talent management, payroll processing, travel and expense (T&E) management, strategic sourcing and procurement, and many other point (or departmental) solutions in many sectors.

But what about a comprehensive multi-tenant on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for manufacturing companies? Well, the choices are still quite slim in that regard.

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Some time in mid-2005 TEC published a six part article on IQMS, a relatively small and obscure enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor based in Paso Robles, California (US), with offices across North America (i.e., in Chicago, Canada, and Mexico), Europe (i.e., Sweden and with recently announced indirect presence in the UK) and Asia (i.e., China and Taiwan). Some readers were likely wondering why I “made so much mileage” out of a seemingly unimportant vendor of fewer than 70 employees and with only a few hundred customers at the time.

Well, I might have been somewhat vindicated in early 2009, when IQMS announced that it closed 2008 with double-digit profitability and a 10 percent increase in new customer accounts. Even as manufacturing markets have tightened and  doom-and-gloom sentiments have pervaded the globe, IQMS has accumulated revenue gains for several years. Namely, in 2005 and 2006, the company grew by about 25 percent each year (which was a multiple of the industry’s average growth), demonstrating its value proposition to selected manufacturing industries worldwide, including medical devices, automotive, aerospace, plastics, and consumer packaged goods (e.g., appliances, electronics, computers/business machines). Read the rest of this entry »

Part II of this blog series allowed members of the two global trade management (GTM) software providers, TradeBeam and Precision Software, to voice their outlooks on the market (in light of the recent global trade decline). But at the end of the post I introduced the question of the possible threat to GTM providers coming from the large enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers.

Given that SAP, Infor and Oracle now have their own GTM offerings, and QAD has recently acquired Precision Software, what can GTM pure-players do against becoming a commoditized offering? In other words, what is it that the likes of Trade Beam, JP Morgan Chase Vastera, GT Nexus, Kewill, or Management Dynamics (and Precision Software if we look at its autonomous operations within QAD) do much better than ERP guys, so that ERP guys will not eat everyone’s lunch? Is it still about some functional features, or also about the service side (consulting and know-how)? Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series analyzed the appropriateness of global sourcing and spend management applications for helping companies improve their cash flows and reduce working capital. It also introduced the question what might happen to global trade management (GTM) applications down the track.

Indeed, what about this credit crunch and recession, and how will that affect the global trade, imports from China, Letters of credit (L/Cs), etc.? With the current sad state of the banking world, many think that discussion about anything other than survival falls on deaf ears at the moment. We are in a bad state, and there is no trust in the system.

The initial sentiment is that corporations are not going to be investing in GTM and sourcing solutions in droves any time soon, other than to make sure they have liquidity to survive. Certainly, the exports/imports will be slower for a while, but does it necessarily follow that people do not need any help from GTM applications? In other words, are there any good GTM features that might even help folks be more effective in these trying times? Read the rest of this entry »

No, my intent here is not necessarily to provide a typical analyst alert after attending a vendor’s annual user conference, in this case the QAD Explore 2008 in Orlando, Florida (US) last month. This is not to imply that there was nothing there to write home about either.

Quite the contrary, the multiple-day event was, well, eventful for market observers and hundreds of QAD’s global customers from both an official (announcements, product demos, etc.) and a fun (food, booze & entertainment) viewpoint. While all of the recorded keynote and breakout sessions can be seen here, the event revolved around the following major themes and highlights: Read the rest of this entry »