QAD Lean Vision
To Speed Information Transfer Along the Supply Chain from Six Weeks to Six Hours

QAD has always been committed to helping our customers achieve excellence in their manufacturing operations. We take seriously our role in helping our customers become world-class manufacturers. And that means that we must provide not only software and services that deliver value, but also the vision to help our customers achieve future success.

QAD's vision for the ultimate manufacturing enterprise is to provide global manufacturers with a set of tools that can enable lean manufacturing and collaboration across the supply chain. Specifically, our vision is to create the ultimate lean enterprise—speeding information transfer along the supply chain from six weeks to six hours. We are delivering on this vision by focusing on providing improvements in manufacturing execution.

Currently, it takes demand information approximately one week to travel from each tier to the next in the supply chain. So a six-tier supply chain, for example, would require roughly six weeks for information to flow from the first tier to the last one. Because so much of the typical supply chain still communicates information manually, the speed of information flowing through the supply chain is slowed, and most suppliers are using information that is not up-to-date to plan operations.

Furthermore, if manufacturers can accurately match supply to demand, they can create a demand pull system based on 'what is' instead of a 'what if' scenario. This approach can significantly eliminate waste, simplify operations, and help make initiatives such as lean manufacturing and lean supply chain a reality.

By delivering on this vision for our customers, the result will be billions of dollars of savings for the manufacturing sector with each member of the supply chain realizing significant benefits.

By incrementally eliminating bottlenecks, demand information can flow seamlessly through the system and suppliers can get near real-time insight into their customers' business. Software can automatically pull data, initiate processes and trigger alerts. Consequently, human intervention is required only to address exceptions and make adjustments to the manufacturing parameters in real time as customer demand changes.

We believe that it is quite possible that in a few years' time, manufacturers worldwide will be able to respond to changes in demand in six hours, instead of six weeks.