Las Vegas, Nevada and Carpinteria, Calif. March 19, 2001 QAD, a provider of applications for global manufacturing enterprises and their private exchanges, has announced that they are now delivering B2B commerce across multiple platforms for manufacturers and suppliers as a result of their strategic alliance with IBM, announced last October.
QAD eQTM B2B applications work with IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite to receive orders placed on Ariba Buyer and intelligently route them to multiple back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications running on IBM eServer pSeries, iSeries and xSeries. "The alliance with QAD provides an outstanding example of how a B2B solution integrated with IBM's e-business middleware can deliver business value to manufacturers and suppliers in the rapidly growing industrial and consumer products segments," said Jack Wagner, IBM global enterprise application solutions.
The applications include Sell-Side, Buy-Side, Order Management and Replenishment, with a Commerce Relationship Management capability that intelligently manages the commerce chain based on the roles, policies and processes that define the organization and how it does business with different suppliers and customers. In addition to managing orders, QAD eQ supports the distributed enterprise by acting as the order and information broker that centralizes B2B commerce and provides a single face to the customer. The applications enable manufacturers and suppliers to set up private trading exchanges and collaboratively place and process orders from anywhere to anywhere via the Internet.
The combined IBM WebSphere Commerce Suite and QAD eQ solution offers the functionality needed to implement a private exchange with on-ramps to procurement systems and e-marketplaces. The solution provides a customizable, customer-facing central order management system that is integrated with multiple back-end systems including personalized business commerce, organizational modeling and complex sales order processing.
QAD has also announced that technical services firm Schlumberger Limited has invested an additional $3.3 million in QAD enterprise applications to upgrade its current package, to support its rapidly growing smart card business unit and to strengthen its ability to rapidly integrate new divisions into its IT infrastructure. Schlumberger is also evaluating QAD eQ B2B applications in order to enhance its customer services through collaborative sales and order processing.
"QAD's comprehensive manufacturing solution has proven to be one of our most valuable IT assets," said Jean Roy, IT manager of Schlumberger's Resource Management Services (RMS) division, which provides professional business services for utilities and energy service providers worldwide. "The applications continue to provide what we need at the operations level and allow us to easily extend our standardized ERP platform to newly acquired companies."
Schlumberger has standardized on QAD's manufacturing solution, MFG/PRO, because its open architecture supports easy connectivity to other business applications and because QAD's integrated enterprise applications are scalable and adaptable. As Schlumberger has diversified, QAD enterprise applications have kept pace with the company's needs and supported ongoing growth.
"We are also pleased that QAD's manufacturing solution is tightly integrated with QAD eQ B2B applications, enabling us to easily add state-of-the-art collaborative commerce capabilities that connect to our ERP solution," added Roy. "This will give us a true end-to-end solution extending from the manufacturing floor to buying and selling across our extended value chain."
