At QAD, we focus our business based on our customers' priorities—and that's not just a new year's resolution. Our customer INSIGHT program, surveys and advisory groups, even change requests made through QAD ServiceLinQ all help us understand our customers' needs. From this nearly continuous interaction, we see two common trends affecting almost all of our customers' IT departments: reducing costs and simplifying systems.

To be sure, these aren't new issues, and they've long played a part in our product development strategies. But you can expect QAD will continue to address these pain points in 2006, through initiatives to reduce IT costs and improve efficiency, as well as improve employee expertise and skills to support problem-solving on the fly.

In this opening edition for the New Year I thought it might be good to update you on QAD's key initiatives to address these pains.

Application Management Reduces Cost, Improves Efficiency

Worldwide, we hear from customers about continuous pressure to decrease operational costs and improve the efficiency of their information technology. Faced with the challenge of delivering higher service levels at lower cost, IT departments are shrinking, and simplification of systems becomes a necessity in order to make maintenance manageable. Fewer servers, simplified desktops and fewer application instances are the goals.

In response, QAD is offering application management services to handle some or the entire burden of supporting application customization and systems integration, helping users, developing strategies to keep your deployment up-to-date, and delivering services more efficiently when limited internal resources make it difficult for your IT department to do so.

Many of our customers already have facilities management programs in place, enlisting a third-party vendor to maintain their hardware on- or off-site. QAD Application Management Services (AMS) complement this strategy for efficient operations, so that our customers can tap QAD experts to manage application function while they focus their own staff on other priorities within the business.

Rather than entirely outsource the IT function, our customers choose where to apply uniquely skilled resources. Employees can focus on business-specific tasks in which they have expertise, and leave QAD application-specific tasks to the pros who have dedicated expertise and experience in maintaining QAD applications. While in-house IT departments conduct software upgrades periodically, our consultants and engineers do this work all the time, as well as database administration, user set-up and everything in between. QAD AMS addresses the challenge of keeping the skills of your support personnel up to date.

QAD is able to harness our existing global infrastructure to support our AMS customers and provide a cost-effective delivery model. QAD groups its service and support capabilities in three tiers, from tasks requiring on-site presence to tasks that require in-region presence or simply a common cultural foundation but no physical interaction. Application management activities can run the gamut, from technical tuning and evaluation to software coding that can be done off-site. Depending on the individual customer engagement, we determine the most effective approach for application management, whether that's contracting or tapping existing resources to work on your site, or using remote management tools and capabilities.

Enhanced Support Helps Employees Work Smarter

While we've designed our application management services to let you decide where and how to use valuable resources, we recognize that you need to cultivate knowledge and skills within your organization. Customers tell us that training new employees is a challenge—and the expense and time constraints grow when you factor in ongoing education required to ensure employees don't fall behind in skills and knowledge.

That's led QAD to enhance specifically our Support capabilities that help customers help themselves, from resources now available at every desktop, to eLearning programs that provide unprecedented breadth and depth of instruction and subject matter. We believe that customers who don't take advantage of these powerful resources could miss out on a measure of value that can only be realized through employees equipped to work smarter.

QAD Solutions Guide
In 2006, customers will find support at every desktop: A maintenance contract provides every single end-user with immediate access to support resources including QAD Knowledgebase and our comprehensive online QAD Solutions Guide. No need for employees to go through the helpdesk or log incidents to get to self-service capabilities: These support tools centralize and streamline problem resolution through direct access to approved resources, rather than creating obstacles and encouraging employees to use unapproved means to solve problems.

Our customers also have told us they want more information about products in order to make informed decisions. For the first time, our online QAD Solutions Guide makes available the rich information resource in which we've invested for QAD internal use, providing full insight into present and intended product function. Content includes comprehensive detail on our flagship QAD MFG/PRO application, the vertical markets we serve, our services offerings—and on down to the operating manuals and workflows for each solution, so that you can get the most from your present QAD investments and determine the functionality that will benefit your business in future.

QAD eLearning
When was the last time your employees went through formal training? If yours is like most companies, plenty of other priorities can easily thwart education goals. But your employees are continually learning, whether prompted by external events such as technology upgrades, or simply through experience. Our customers tell us it's an ongoing challenge to ensure employees are trained on new and contemporary techniques in controlling manufacturing—much less to ensure that knowledge is consistent throughout the company.

QAD eLearning equips business and manufacturing employees with the conceptual understanding and techniques to implement core and advanced manufacturing concepts. Employees gain the power—from their desktops—to study products and manufacturing concepts such as lean manufacturing, strategic sourcing and procurement. In addition to providing a link between these concepts and use of QAD MFG/PRO, QAD eLearning and the QAD Solutions Guide offer a channel for communicating and solutions that address external pressures such as compliance and regulatory requirements.

QAD Brings Lean Principles to IT

Customers continually ask suppliers to respond more rapidly, and that's prompted manufacturers in developed markets to focus on improving efficiencies within their operations. But the principles of lean manufacturing just as easily apply to IT—and lean execution is exactly what happens by using IT more efficiently and delivering just what is required. In 2006, expect QAD to deliver applications in areas that are emerging as important to our customers, equipping them with tools to accelerate demand chain and help them embrace lean principles throughout their operations.

In the meantime, we're continually thinking about ways to enhance QAD applications even between functional releases, to ensure customers have the technical capabilities to be their most efficient and successful. So in addition to enhancements that constitute future product releases, we're working on usability and many customers are testing our new Microsoft .NET interface. This interface will coexist with our current applications and add a new level of usability that customers have told us will help add incremental efficiency—and contribute to bottom-line cost savings.

Want to find out how QAD can support your success in the new year? Contact your account representative or QAD Global Services to find out how application management, enhanced support and eLearning can help your business—and just click www5.qad.com/solutionsguide to check out the QAD Solutions Guide today!