Early Adopters Embrace Fully Embedded Business Process Management in QAD Enterprise Applications

Early Adopters Embrace Fully Embedded Business Process Management in QAD Enterprise Applications

QAD Solutions Teams Help Global Customers Realize Return on Rapid Deployment, and Drive Enterprise Performance, Operational Process Quality and Greater Agility

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- QAD Inc. (NAS: QADA) (NAS: QADB) , a leading provider of enterprise software and services for global manufacturers, today announced early adopters of the new QAD Business Process Management (BPM) solution are realizing significant improvements in enterprise performance. Delivered as part of their maintenance plan, customers utilizing QAD Enterprise Applications gain the fully integrated QAD BPM solution that is driving greater operational excellence and agility while offering easy on-boarding for business users.

IMRIS Sees QAD Enterprise Applications as a Core Platform

"QAD Enterprise Applications solution is the core platform our company uses to manage our customer orders and deliveries," said Ben VanOsch, director of IT Services at IMRIS, a global leader in providing image guided therapy solutions through its VISIUS Surgical Theatre. "The announcement of the QAD BPM early adopter program at the QAD 2012 Explore conference was extremely timely and valuable for us. Earlier this year, our company began re-engineering our business processes. Using QAD BPM allows us to automate the manual notification components, streamline our workflow and mitigate risks associated with paper notifications and tribal knowledge of our systems and products."

QAD BPM supports implementations of management practices, policies and metrics to enable businesses to improve their efficiency. It consists of software tools designed to help organizations document, automate, manage, analyze and improve processes. It offers enterprises a faster, better and more intelligent way to visualize and automate business processes. QAD BPM empowers organizations to identify and follow conditional decision points throughout the business process. It allows measurement of key process efficiencies critical to facilitating process improvement.

Dedicated QAD Services and Solutions Team Helps Customer Go Live on Time

"The QAD team was invaluable in helping us deliver the requirements on schedule and configure our systems accordingly," added VanOsch. "We see QAD BPM becoming the core tool within the QAD stack that will help us drive efficiencies in our business through business rules, alerts and workflow."

With QAD BPM, companies gain greater visibility across the entire organization to identify and optimize end-to-end performance.

"Many businesses have unique processes that may exist on the edge but are integrated with their enterprise resource planning (ERP)," stated Mike Beasley, director of Information Systems at Mueller Industries. "The QAD BPM tool has allowed us to fully align our work procedures with our QAD systems. The enhanced visibility of the workflows allows us to better monitor and continue to improve our process quality, and makes user cross training and new user on-boarding much more effective."

The new BPM offering from QAD helps manufacturers:

• Create, manage, and automate business process models which can be used to assign tasks to individuals or departments based on their roles and responsibilities.

• Provide the information needed to monitor active processes through pre-defined metrics and identify what doesn't work in order to reduce or eliminate bottlenecks.

• Modify business processes affected by internal or external changes and implement them across the company without causing major disruptions to the activities of their employees.

QAD Delivers the Power of Simplicity for IT with Fully Embedded BPM

In a recent research note published about the new QAD BPM announcement, Nucleus Research discussed the value of a fully embedded solution versus partial functionality: "Many ERP vendors provide workflow management and even some BPM functionality as part of their core ERP offering, but these features are usually not enough for companies to create and manage business processes. Another approach adopted by ERP vendors is to integrate with standalone BPM solutions provided by vendors like IBM, Software AG, SAP, or Oracle. Integration between ERP and BPM may work, but it brings with it technological and organizational challenges, which can add to the complexity of the IT infrastructure managed by the company.

"An embedded BPM module offers the best of both worlds because it is part of the ERP package and requires little or no maintenance. It also provides robust functionality for companies to manage their business processes and change them as required. The embedded BPM module enables businesses to be more agile since they can react quickly to changes in their industry or market and minimize the disruptions caused by these changes. Another important challenge that agile business processes can address is regulatory compliance for industries like life sciences and food and beverage." (Nucleus Research m146 - The impact of business software integration on ROI, October 2012. © 2012 Nucleus Research, Inc.)

"We continuously innovate QAD Enterprise Applications with capabilities like this full fledged, fully embedded BPM solution because it helps our manufacturing customers become more effective in a big way," said Bill Keese, SVP research and development at QAD. "The power and simplicity our customers gain with QAD BPM helps them run better processes, deliver excellence and align with strategic goals to become more effective enterprises."

For more information on QAD BPM and QAD Enterprise Applications, visit www.qad.com.

About QAD

QAD is a leading provider of enterprise applications for global manufacturing companies specializing in automotive, consumer products, electronics, food and beverage, industrial and life sciences products. QAD applications provide critical functionality for managing manufacturing resources and operations within and beyond the enterprise, enabling global manufacturers to collaborate with their customers, suppliers and partners to make and deliver the right product, at the right cost and at the right time. For more information about QAD, telephone +1 805-566-6000, or visit the QAD web site at www.qad.com.

"QAD" is a registered trademark of QAD Inc. All other products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Note to Investors: This press release contains certain forward-looking statements made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "expects", "believes", "anticipates", "could", "will likely result", "estimates", "intends", "may", "projects", "should", and variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to identify these forward looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the company's current expectations and assumptions regarding its business, the economy and future conditions. A number of risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to, evolving demand for the company's software products and products that operate with the company's products; the company's ability to sustain license and service demand; the company's ability to leverage changes in technology; the company's ability to sustain customer renewal rates at current levels; the publication of opinions by industry and financial analysts about the company, its products and technology; the reliability of estimates of transaction and integration costs and benefits; the entry of new competitors or new offerings by existing competitors and the associated announcement of new products and technological advances by them; delays in localizing the company's products for new or existing markets; the ability to recruit and retain key personnel; delays in sales as a result of lengthy sales cycles; changes in operating expenses, pricing, timing of new product releases, the method of product distribution or product mix; timely and effective integration of newly acquired businesses; general economic conditions; exchange rate fluctuations; and, the global political environment. In addition, revenue and earnings in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software industry are subject to fluctuations. Software license revenue, in particular, is subject to variability with a significant proportion of revenue earned in the last month of each quarter. Given the high margins associated with license revenue, modest fluctuations can have a substantial impact on net income. Investors should not use any one quarter's results as a benchmark for future performance. For a more detailed description of the risk factors associated with the company and the industries in which it operates, please refer to the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2012 ended January 31, 2012, and in particular, the section entitled "Risk Factors" therein, and in other periodic reports the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

QAD Inc.
Ashley DeVan
Sr. Director of Marketing Communications
+1 805-566-6126
ashley.devan@qad.com
or
Heidi Wieland
Media Relations
+1 805-565-2452
Heidi.wieland@qad.com

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