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A company’s success hinges on its ability to make optimal decisions quickly. While this sounds easy enough, the ability to base decisions on facts rather than guesswork has often been problematic. While the data resides in the company’s business systems, presenting it to users in their time of need in an easily understood format has been the sheer dream for IT professionals. Now, the dream is a reality with QAD Action Centers.

What are QAD Action Centers?

QAD Action Centers are role-based dashboards that include real-time actionable insight into the current status of the business. They offer next-generation analytics that help managers and users easily monitor metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their areas of responsibility. The built-in analytics read data directly from the QAD database and generate visual representations that show process status and health. Organizations can easily operate effectively using the built-in metrics, or they can modify the KPIs to suit their own environments. They can also create and use their own KPIs using familiar tools like Browses or the QAD Financial Report Writer. For all metrics, users can slice and dice the data to answer specific questions, and the KPIs can be grouped into personal or shared dashboards.

Action Centers are designed to make a user’s job easier by providing the information they need to make rapid, accurate fact-based decisions or to alert users to current or potential problems. This actionable insight enables the user to optimize decisions and choices, or to take steps to avert a problem.

action centers

How Do Action Centers Differ from Traditional BI and KPIs?

The most important differences between traditional KPIs and Business Intelligence (BI) tools, and Action Centers are the speed and graphical capabilities. Critical KPIs can update in near real-time, at specified intervals or as required. The format of the graphics can be set to show the data in a format that provides the clearest insight to users. 

Secure and Flexible Access to Data

Access to action centers and KPIs is controlled by strong security. Individual users or roles may be granted the ability to read, delete or update specific KPIs or visuals and to create new KPIs. Users must have access to the ‘Browse’ the KPI is based on to be able to use the KPI, so you never need to worry about unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Along with this security comes the ability to create new KPIs and store them in a public gallery so other authorized users can access or modify them. KPIs can be grouped into dashboards or added to predefined dashboards.

This enables the company to provide users with the data they need to do their jobs without worrying about security issues. It also takes the burden off IT because they don’t need to create custom queries for users whenever a question comes up. 

The whole company operates more effectively using this streamlined decision process and with the real-time insight into operations.

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Role-based Action Centers

QAD Adaptive ERP comes with a series of predefined Action Centers that include some of the most commonly used KPIs and metrics for specific roles.

Over the next few months, we’ll look at each of the predefined Action Centers by role to explain the KPIs as well as best practices for each.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Sounds interesting.
    Many questions including what versions this is available for and at what cost (if any)?
    A you-tube style video might be the easiest way to illustrate what you have here.
    Will it be covered in the European user-day later this year?

    • Hi Mark,
      QAD Action Centers are included in QAD Adaptive ERP at no additional cost for Cloud subscription customers. There is an annual fee for on-premise customers. We do not yet have the agenda finalized for the European User Day, so please monitor our Events page (https://www.qad.com/about/events) for more information. Thank you!

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