The New Requirements for Business

Over the course of our journey together, customers have come to know QAD for our passion for simplicity and our commitment to your business success. From shop-floor automation tools to global enterprise solutions, QAD has become a trusted technology partner, helping reduce inefficiencies and increase productivity for manufacturing companies worldwide. And that's because QAD Enterprise Applications are focused and specifically optimized for the six highly competitive manufacturing industries we serve.

This industry focus is a key differentiator for QAD and a key benefit for our customers. As such, it has enabled us to develop global solutions that meet our customers' new requirements for business. Here's what customers have told us they're looking for:

• Clarity, to view business processes at the global level and make strategic decisions with reliable information for local operations.
• Agility, to anticipate and react instantly to changing market pressures and customer demands.
• Unity, to form long-term, positive relationships with extended supply chain members that increase your competitive advantage and benefit your bottom-line.

For more than a quarter of a century, manufacturers like you have relied on QAD's understanding of your industry to help you compete in the global market-giving you the edge to continually improve your business performance. Now, QAD is showing customers the way into a new era, with new solutions to boost operational excellence and productivity, and new business approaches to ensure your long-term success.

Powered by our passion for simplicity, QAD solutions for the next stage of your business are designed to reduce the complexity within your manufacturing operations, while providing you business advantages to modify your systems according to changing customer needs and business requirements.

A Solution for Your Business

As the global marketplace evolves and expands, successful businesses will stand apart from the competition as those that maintain clarity necessary to control their global enterprise, without sacrificing the agility required to respond appropriately to local conditions.

Achieving this delicate balance requires clear insight into the minute-by-minute goings-on of your business. Analyst firm Aberdeen Group found a correlation between the frequency with which manufacturers measured the results of their lean initiatives, and their success rates. Close to 30 percent of the manufacturers whose lean practices ranked best-in-class measure their results daily. ⁱ A clear view of reliable, on-demand performance data enables you to make strategic business decisions on the fly without fear of compromising your efforts with inaccurate information.

The balance between global and local also entails unity among suppliers, manufacturing plants, warehouses, transportation, distributors and others. Close collaboration with your extended supply chain enables you to increase responsiveness and remain agile to keep pace with fluctuations in customer and supplier demand. One of the three most important strategic actions cited by the Aberdeen Group study's lean best-in-class respondents was improving manufacturing and supply chain flexibility. ⁱⁱ

This year at Explore 2006, our annual customer conference, attendees learned about the QAD Demand Driven Enterprise Initiative and the new product releases and strategic enhancements that deliver on QAD's commitment to unite the extended manufacturing enterprise. These solutions introduce the power of simplicity to achieve the clarity, agility and unity that fulfill the new requirements for business.

On the heels of the Advanced Manufacturing Initiative, which produced the QAD Global Enterprise Edition product portfolio, the Demand Driven Enterprise Initiative provides customers advantages in the global market by optimizing and streamlining the demand process, and fully integrating that demand model with internal operations as well as those across the extended enterprise. These latest solutions provide you with leading-edge tools for achieving more accurate demand forecasts, a more seamless connection between production and supply functions-as well as more efficient demand fulfillment..

Solution highlights include:

QAD .NET User Interface
The new QAD user interface, QAD .NET UI, addresses a user's need for flexibility. Capitalizing on the Microsoft .NET development environment, QAD .NET UI supports increased productivity through a user-friendly environment and seamless integration with familiar productivity applications such as Microsoft Excel. This interface adds a new level of usability that customers have told us will help add incremental efficiency-and contribute to bottom-line cost savings.

QAD Configurator
Easy to use and flexible, the QAD Configurator provides tools to easily configure complex products during order entry, regardless of technical knowledge of the product or the system. Your engineers and sales members alike will find the support they need to serve your customers, thanks to consistency of the configuration process and maintainability of the database.

QAD Demand Management
A demand management solution should create unity between supply chain members and enable seamless collaboration through the extended enterprise. With QAD Demand Management, you can more accurately anticipate customer and supplier demand and proactively manage inventory levels-improving customer service and retention levels and for long-term benefit.

QAD Distributed Order Management
The QAD Distributed Order Management (DOM) solution extends Shared Services Domain capabilities for global integration and local execution. Your ability to manage orders from a central location, while maintaining centralized control, adds clarity and simplicity to your business processes for essential visibility and regulatory compliance.

A Vision for the Industry

Today's leading manufacturers will remain at the forefront of their industries by leveraging the latest technology principles and adhering to the new business requirements. Meeting ever-changing customer expectations and increased supplier demands is vital for sustaining competitive advantage and profitability for the long-term. From working closely with customers, we understand the challenges manufacturers face to bridge the gap between technology and business objectives. And we and committed to transforming technology into a powerful enabler of business agility, change and growth.

QAD has long focused on supply chain communications as an untapped area for our customers' cost savings. Here, we can use technology to your advantage, to advance the flow of information across systems and suppliers and achieve something like economists' "perfect market." In the perfect market, each and every participant has the right information at the right time for maximum efficiency.

QAD envisions a "perfect lean market" for manufacturing, where technology enables the uninterrupted flow of information across platforms, giving multinational manufacturers clear insight into their extended enterprises; more nimble, agile operations; and seamless, real-time connections with customers, partners and suppliers.

In our vision of the perfect lean market, waste is eliminated and processes are streamlined to their optimum levels. Information is shared with absolutely no delay, processes are reduced to value-added tasks and global manufacturers achieve success in the fastest amount of time, with the least amount of effort.

Driven by our passion for the manufacturing industry, QAD's goal is to help customers join in our pursuit of this vision. The perfect lean market will demand innovative technology and a commitment to remove every unnecessary element of complexity from core business processes. The perfect lean market will require new metrics for manufacturing success-value based on customers' ability to live with their enterprise systems over time. We anticipate solutions that make it easier to manage overall compliance requirements and that consolidate resources to increase predictable performance will be well-received in the boardroom as well as on the plant floor. Why? Because enhanced planning, visibility, control and monitoring capabilities will lead to customer responsiveness and bottom-line success.

A Commitment to Your Success

Backed by an unparalleled dedication to our customers' success, QAD is committed to propelling your company forward, keeping you one step ahead of the competition. We share a common goal with customers-to make manufacturing as productive as possible. And our long-term relationships with our customers are the bedrock foundation for the products we continue to build and the services we deliver.

To optimize your business, your enterprise software needs to be intuitive, easy to implement and highly reliable. It needs to provide immediate value, at a low cost. This principle continues to guide us as QAD launches the third generation of QAD Enterprise Applications, our most comprehensive and effective ERP solutions yet for global manufacturers.

Our promise to customers is to deliver the power of simplicity in everything we do. With our latest solutions that meet the requirements for business today and in the future, we are delivering on that promise every day.

ⁱ Aberdeen Group, "The Lean Benchmark Report," March 2006.

ⁱⁱ Ibid.