QAD continues to strengthen its ERP Experience with a Next Generation User Interface
Posted on: March 30, 2016 | By: David Kwo | QAD Practice News, QAD Business Process
At QAD’s 2015 Explore, announced its next generation user interface. Called Channel Islands after a group of islands visible from QAD’s Santa Barbara headquarters. It will be unveiled at QAD’s Explore 2016 here in Chicago this May. This announcement alone is a compelling reason to attend the conference, as it firmly addresses the one area where QAD lagged the ERP industry leaders, the user experience. Since its inception, QAD has been recognized as a leader in manufacturing based ERP systems. Logan Consulting has implemented many ERP systems, including Baan, SAP, Oracle and JD Edwards. One of the reasons our Firm decided to focus more on QAD is that unlike many of its competitors, QAD’s software implemented quickly and was easier to support and maintain.
It’s financials did lag its competitors and to its credit, QAD corrected this by buying, and then integrating new functionality (called Enterprise Edition) that specifically addressed the global currency and global reporting issues its multi-national companies were facing. The EE Version closed the gap in the financial functionality versus the industry leaders. But the user interface continued to be a weak spot for QAD. When our Strategy and Selection Practice led ERP selections, QAD almost always scored among the highest, if not the highest in manufacturing functionality, it was always in the bottom half, if not the bottom in the user experience scoring. With Channel Islands, QAD has closed the user experience gap as well. Leveraging the HTML5 specifications(extremely important with the increasing need for web access), QAD will now have a flexibility that it did not have when using the Microsoft .Net interface. QAD continues to make enhancements and improvements in its ERP and supporting functionality. We are very pleased to see that it now has a world class User Interface experience.