Performance Made Portable™

Eagle Consulting & Development: A QAD Alliance Partner and Platinum Sponsor of QAD Explore 2007

A strategic partner of QAD since 1992, Eagle has shared QAD's journey toward excellence.  But excellence is a process, much like moving toward infinity.  As customer needs and system capabilities evolve, reworking goals and language becomes as important as reworking the product, simply because goals and language ensure that we are all on the same page. 

This year QAD clearly states a commitment to simplicity and the “Perfect Lean Market," and describes its approach in terms of "Performance Made…"  Performance Made Easy.  Performance Made Clear.  Performance Made Powerful. Taking its cue from QAD, Eagle identified its unique role in the "Performance Made…"  arena, and that is "Performance Made Portable," recognizing Eagle's successful deployment of portable wireless technology to QAD users worldwide.  

Eagle appreciates this opportunity to share with our mutual customers some of the key capabilities of successful QAD product partners.

What should customers be looking for in a product that complements QAD?
Manufacturers of all sizes from around the world cite integration with QAD enterprise applications, performance improvement, functionality, technology, efficient implementation services and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as key factors.  As multi-site databases become increasingly common, organizations also value the ability to configure functionality on a site-specific basis while operating on a single database and without changing any source code.

Conclusion:  Customers should be looking for a product whose architecture, coding language, technology, environment, industries served and worldwide support network align fully with QAD's. 

Eagle is in a unique position as a product partner because it serves only the QAD community. Its product, by design, evolved in alignment with QAD's.  The integration of the two systems is so seamless that Eagle's customers require no intermediate servers or other hardware.  No middleware.  And no modifications to QAD Enterprise Applications.  Eagle's portable wireless technology solution captures each transaction at its source, in real time, using Progress-based standard product. The data is edited and validated used QAD's own edit routines.  The solution is unified, simple and — with no server baggage — "travels light."  Eagle even handles the site-configurable functionality in a simple and easy-to-use fashion, providing a table of over 1,000 standard, configurable settings that can be used to modify transactions in minutes.

Why is a fully integrated ADC solution important?
The more you move information around, the more important it becomes to capture it correctly the first time. Manual systems are less and less tenable as manufacturers compete on productivity as much as product. In 1992, many manufacturers handled data collection with paper, pencil and a clipboard. But the downstream cost grew exponentially as competition increased.

Time lost in error checking, inventory inaccuracies, over-ordering to cover mistakes and the delay in access to information became more and more costly. Poor ADC systems have a secondary cost in their inability to take full advantage of QAD's capabilities. In fact, harnessing a sophisticated enterprise system like QAD to a manual or poorly integrated ADC system is like asking a thoroughbred to slow down and wait. Wait while batch processes catch up. Wait while poorly validated data is corrected. Meanwhile, transactions continue to pile up. Errors continue to occur. And the process creates an electronic downward spiral.

What one customer says
At Explore 2007, Eaton Corp., a premier industrial organization, joins with Eagle in presenting seven critical factors in selecting an ADC solution.  Eaton's requirements list included driving 100 percent data accuracy and real-time access to information across three continents.  Not to mention meeting industry-, regional- and country-specific requirements. Eagle RF Express for QAD Enterprise Applications, is Eaton's standard ADC solution, and has met the requirements so successfully that Eaton has taken this solution worldwide: a perfect example of Performance Made Portable.

Conclusion
As manufacturers face tighter and tighter requirements from their supply chain partners and tougher compliance rules from existing and emerging regulatory agencies, the ability to provide a flexible, growing and agile solution is not just important.  It's essential.  Choosing the right ADC solution is a key part of a "Performance Made… " solution.

About Eagle:  Eagle is the leading provider of portable wireless technology to QAD customers worldwide.  The portable wireless technology umbrella includes bar coding, RFID and other Automated Data Collection (ADC) technologies, as well as many industry-specific capabilities developed in response to the needs of our customers. Eagle has been recognized as QAD's Product Partner Alliance of the Year in three of the last four years.
www.eaglecondev.com