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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) specialist QAD announced enhancements to its Cloud ERP and Enterprise Applications 2016 and to its transportation management system and enterprise asset management platform.
Santa Cruz, the second phase of the company’s Project Channel Islands user experience initiative, is available to early adopters running on 2015 and 2016 versions of Cloud ERP.
The multi-year Project Channel Islands gives customers the choice of deploying a device-independent user experience personalized for roles, tasks and individual users.
“The takeaway is to give customers what our research deems as the best user experience for a business function or user role, but also to give the user the freedom to adapt their user experience as much as possible,” Evan Quinn, director of marketing at QAD, told eWEEK. “That is why we decided to give users the option to keep older user experiences or move to the QAD Channel Islands user experience and the opportunity to move back and forth.”
The company’s internationalization program is designed to provide innovation and legal and regulatory help for global manufacturing companies, with several new capabilities, including the ability to add taxes to pre-payments.
Quinn explained internationalization is an essential component for businesses of all types, and certainly for global manufacturers.
“Internationalization stretches well beyond simply supporting languages and different GAAP and financial reporting options to tax and compliance requirements in the context of actually doing business,” he said. “Taking the wide view of Internationalization, it becomes a very complex undertaking, not just for multi-nationals but any company doing business overseas.”
That is why QAD runs the I19 program, which consists of experts that closely track all aspects of internationalization, for example, at the country level.
The program monitors legislation and looks for more efficient techniques to embed areas like tax and compliance within existing transactions and processes.
The goal of I19 is to do the work for the customer, to ensure QAD’s solutions make it easy for customers to comply with the most recent changes and to not create new, more complex processes to achieve the necessary internationalization.
QAD offers a variety of products closely related to ERP and has added innovations to most of them for March, including Your Application Builder (YAB), a dashboard and management tool used to increase the speed and reliability of implementations and upgrades.
“In the future of ERP, you want to have an integration-friendly API architecture future proofs ERP against new drivers like robots and IoT, a user experience-flexible architecture future proofs ERP against new UIs and immersive experiences and an architecture that pulls together more closely historically related but not previously deeply integrated apps makes sense to future proof areas like 3D printing,” Quinn said.