Carpinteria, CA January 7, 2003 QAD, a collaborative commerce solution provider, this week announced it has won contracts with four more multinational companies in the Czech Republic. Among the new customers are Japanese automotive supplier Aisan Bitron Czech s.r.o.; consumer products manufacturers Tusculum a.s. and Decodom spol. s.r.o.; and restaurant equipment supplier RETIGO s.r.o.
QAD implementation partner Minerva Cesk· republika, a.s. is helping the customers standardize on QAD's flagship MFG/PRO suite of enterprise applications for manufacturing to link factory, financial and logistics functions.
For companies such as Decodom and RETIGO, strong regional customer references were crucial to selecting a software partner. For more than a decade, QAD has been employed by Czech and Slovak manufacturers to help them operate more efficiently, and today, QAD is used by more than 50 manufacturers in the region, including 17 automotive suppliers.
As the region's manufacturing sector continues to grow, QAD said Czech companies are seeking enterprise software to serve as a foundation for consistent operations across multiple locations. This goes for both new operations, such as Aisan Bitron's facility scheduled to open in 2003, or existing plants, such as Tusculum's three sites in the South Moravia region.
Dedication of individual factory locations to specific manufacturing methods or product lines, like Decodom's three independent production and assembly plants, can further complicate and intensify the need for standardized financials and other horizontal functions. In addition, demand from new regional customers and growing multinational business, such as RETIGO's domestic and export sales and Aisan Bitron's contracts with PSA, Fiat, Renault and Toyota, mandates these companies accommodate multiple languages and currencies.
QAD explained that its focus on manufacturing dictates the architecture and features of the MFG/PRO platform. The platform is based on industry standards and a distributed architecture, allowing it to be deployed locally to suit individual sites and interface automatically with software at other facilities.
Trading partners based outside the Czech Republic have consistent interaction from such manufacturers as RETIGO because of MFG/PRO's support for 26 languages and multiple foreign currencies.
Finally, QAD said MFG/PRO captures and uses real-time data to synchronize production with demand, allowing companies such as Aisan Bitron, which serves the highly competitive automotive market, to achieve lean manufacturing operations.
