The End to End Imperative

As innovators in manufacturing and supply chain, QAD dares to dive deep into the source of barriers to efficiency, productivity, and profit

In supply chain, problems disguise themselves. In the quest to discover and remediate the root cause of inefficiencies, it’s vital to understand that every element in the chain and the business is interconnected and that nothing operates in isolation. As companies of all sizes endeavor to become “fast fish” in the global economy, failure to look at the whole of their business will leave them floundering.

Since 1979, QAD has been helping global manufacturers navigate the challenges and uncertainties that hinder sustainable growth. Their solutions are designed to improve profit margins, ensure compliance, and satisfy ESG requirements.

Roy Arguelles

“Many companies view software as a savior and believe that its functionality will solve the problem,” according to Roy Arguelles, SVP Supply Chain for QAD. “In reality, software is only one piece of the puzzle, albeit a major one.” Arguelles oversees the direction and execution of QAD’s supply chain go-to market strategies, ensuring that their solutions and people address the needs of modern business.

“You have to look at people, processes, and systems. If you plug the same software into two different companies, more often than not you’ll get two different outcomes because efficiency is achieved by ensuring that people, processes, and systems work in synergy,” he added. “We take much more of a holistic and comprehensive approach, looking at manufacturing and supply chains from end to end.”

For QAD, understanding processes is a major focus. The ROI for process mining and intelligence depends on specificity. Their meticulous approach identifies opportunities to reduce the time required to complete a process, which leads to reducing the cost associated with delivering it and lowers the risk involved in completing it.

“Processes were made to deliver efficiencies, but they were built in the past, and evolved over time,” Arguelles said. “Many times, they’re not executed as they were intentionally designed because they don’t anticipate new exceptions in the process or policy changes.”

QAD’s real time monitoring process discovery makes root cause analysis faster, easier, and more informative. “Supply chains will always create inefficiencies, but they have to be flexible and agile,” he stressed, noting that profit margins decrease when businesses are unprepared to deal with uncertainty. Demand, supply, and capacity planning are critical to ensure sustainable profit margins. “Profit margins have to be resilient, efficient, and must be able to flex in response to demand or product mix.”

The modern supply chain needs to optimize efficiency, agility, and resiliency, and QAD’s Adaptive Enterprise approach simultaneously advances all three for effective customer service. Success is achieved by optimizing people, processes, and systems from the shop floor to the top floor, and across the supply chain from raw materials to finished goods.

QAD’s industrial transformation platform (ITP) is embedded in everything they do from software design, implementation methodologies, coaching, customer success, and beyond. It recognizes that software itself is not enough to achieve success.

“It’s our people, long-standing expertise in manufacturing, and understanding industries such as food and beverage, automotive, consumer products, and life science, to name a few,” Arguelles explained.

“We embed that intelligence into our software to get you where you want to go. It’s also about systematic approaches for implementation, because we’re big believers in accelerating time-to-value process intelligence and debugging and optimizing process execution in real time.”

As it relates to supply chain, ITP covers the full spectrum of areas, including global trade management, imports, exports, logistics execution, digital supply chain planning and forecasting, supplier management, and worker productivity.

The ability to seamlessly integrate into a company’s ecosystem is also critical to the success of their approach, especially on the shop floor. “When we work within a business, empowering the frontline workers is as important as everything else. They’ve got to remain productive and engaged, and we’ve got to make sure the company retains the right people to deliver results.”

At present, QAD is taking a close look at the ways AI can amplify manufacturing and supply chain intelligence, particularly when it comes to leveraging AI and demand forecasting. They view process intelligence as substantive AI that can identify how they’re running and what areas can be improved to drive costs and improve efficiency.

“AI can be very helpful in processing classification when you’re thinking about imports. It helps people understand and code products for import so they can achieve better reductions and manage tariffs,” he said. “Third-party logistics providers need to enhance visibility and understand how that visibility can help them be proactive and predictive at the same time. Those are areas of low hanging fruit for manufacturing supply chain owners. That’s what I think a pragmatic approach to AI should be.

“We firmly believe in challenging the status quo,” he concluded. “Innovation and improvement helps companies transform into those fast fish. And those are the fast fish that outpace the competition.”

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QAD Inc. is a leading provider of next-generation manufacturing and supply chain solutions in the cloud. To succeed in a turbulent world, facing disruptions in supply and fluctuations in demand, manufacturers and supply chains must rapidly respond to change and seamlessly optimize agility, efficiency, and resilience for effective customer service. QAD delivers Adaptive Applications to enable these Adaptive Enterprises.

Founded in Santa Barbara, California, QAD has customers in 84 countries around the world. Thousands of companies have deployed QAD enterprise solutions including enterprise resource planning (ERP), digital commerce (DC), supplier relationship management (SRM), digital supply chain planning (DSCP), global trade and transportation execution (GTTE), enterprise quality management system (EQMS), connected workforce and process intelligence.

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