You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that it takes a foundation to build a successful enterprise. This way of thinking is echoed by the importance of being agile in your approach as well as your execution. Agility can be found just about anywhere in our professional lives. Is the system agile? Is the process agile? Is the team agile? Agility can be attained in so many different ways, and results can be achieved in just about any working environment.
When it comes to your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, ensuring that your solution is agile enough to handle disruptive challenges – such as new technologies, changes in customer demand, regulations and compliance – is critical. Many organizations work tirelessly to customize their solution to fit the challenges of today. This is good for you now, but what about five, 10 or 20 years from now? Will your ERP be agile then?
Fit for Today, Fit for Tomorrow
In 2017, QAD unveiled a platform for manufacturers founded on agility. The QAD Enterprise Platform enables manufacturers to rapidly adapt to evolving business environments while ensuring their business processes stay aligned. But how do you retain effectiveness in a constantly changing landscape? QAD believes the ability of an ERP solution to respond quickly to these types of disruptions, to deliver fit to requirements as they change over time and support new business processes, is key to its effectiveness.
The QAD Enterprise Platform gives manufacturers the ability to rapidly adapt to change and leverage new and advanced technologies, ensuring their business processes stay aligned with a rapidly evolving business environment. It provides a device-independent, agile platform that allows customers to expand QAD Cloud ERP functionality with new capabilities through extensibility, personalization and the ability to write new apps without code.
“The pace of change has increased dramatically, making the ability to react quickly a must-have for enterprise applications. The QAD Enterprise Platform is engineered to be agile. Traditional ERP solutions react to change and achieve fit through costly, time-consuming customizations which make upgrades to the latest functionality difficult. The QAD Enterprise Platform reduces the need for customization, allowing customers to extend and personalize our software without touching the source code. This provides greater adaptability and increases the value of enhancements through greater longevity.” — Pam Lopker, chairman and president, QAD
Benefits of an Agile ERP System
The QAD Enterprise Platform provides five rapid response technologies, each of which address a common cause of ERP solution customization:
- Personalization: Allows for screen modification using a simple graphical point-and-click interface.
- Embedded Analytics: High-powered analytics let users rapidly create and modify reports, dashboards and design custom alerts.
- Modularity: The platform consists of four areas, including financials, customer management, supply chain and manufacturing, that can be upgraded individually without having to upgrade the entire application.
- Extensibility: A REST API approach allows for easy integration between third-party apps, web services or homegrown systems.
- New Apps: New apps can be developed by users allowing for a deep, customer-specific functionality at a reduced cost without causing system rigidity.
By reducing the effort and expertise required to make changes to existing ERP systems, the QAD Enterprise Platform can enable manufacturers to maximize the return on their ERP investment. This makes it easier to achieve greater levels of fit and rapidly respond to the changes required to ensure the strategic business alignment of ERP now and into the future.
“Using the QAD Enterprise Platform, users will be able to create apps in days instead of months. This will reduce the need for costly and complex customizations that can inhibit them from making future upgrades and changes. When users upgrade, their apps will be available with each new version. That’s the beauty of an agile solution: it’s here for you today and will fit your future unknown requirements as well.” —Bill Keese, senior vice president, Research and Development, QAD
To learn more about the QAD Enterprise Platform, read our most recent white paper.
