QAD MFG/PRO Consulting Services

After working on QAD MFG/PRO consulting services for many years since 1990, all I can say is that it has been quite a fulfilling journey for me. I started working on QAD product in 1990. That was the first time QAD was brought into Singapore where I am based. I was working at Singapore Computer Systems. This was a large IT company with over 1000 professional. The core business was to build software and hardware systems (mainly in the government sector and defense industry). QAD was among the first products that were targeting purely at commercial sectors. This company has since been merged with NCS last year and no longer exist. This is the effect of competition. With the influx of low cost IT professionals, there has been very strong pressure on project margins. SCS become one of the victims.

Overall, QAD Consulting Services has seen its boom time in the 1990′s in Singapore. That was the time when we are always short of man power for MFG/PRO expertise. That was a time when manufacturing was at its peak in Singapore and the demand was just overwhelming. Since the 2000′s, times has changed. Most of the manufacturing companies has moved their productions to China and other countries. Most of the remaining QAD customers here are the head office or doing distribution business.

The change in over industry landscape calls for different approaches toward the QAD MFG/PRO Consulting services business. Currently, many people would use Singapore as a base and perform jobs around the region. The key approach is to “export” the expertise from here.

Another change in the landscape is the demand for integration with other systems. Most global companies uses other systems in some other areas of operations while using QAD MFG/PRO for their manufacturing operations. There is a demand to integrate these system. For example, one of my customer has a system that they build in-house for “distributing” order request. This system was developed on Oracle platform and it manages customer (internal & external) demands and searches different countries to determine the best place to ship from based on Lead Time and Available To Promise. It works this way. A demand comes in. It posts to different countries for the available to promise and lead time. Based on the collated result, it determines where the order to send to. Once determined, it send order to the country. The country receiving the order (electronically) will generate SO in the MFG/PRO and perform the necessary supply chain operations until product is shipped and invoiced.

All these changes requires a consultant to be more versatile in his ability to delivery integration projects. It helps when he is a technically competence. A consultant who only handles business process and product functionality will be facing uphill task in adding values to customers.

Yes and No. (Am I tying to be politically correct? No, there is no politics involved here )

I am talking about maintenance programs, not just reports. Of course, QAD will give you source codes for your reports. You should have not problem with them.

For maintenance programs: Yes, if you application is on UNIX character based (telnet session). Otherwise, most likely not.

The method I talk about here is called the “Wrapper” method. Now, you have the idea. Yes, you can write a wrapper program to customize your QAD application and add new fields or hide fields for your maintenance programs. As usual, you can use PROGRESS feature of INPUT FROM but first formatting the input data and running it. Sounds simple. Right?

Of course the challenge is when you are changing maintenance programs that has multiple frames and different scenarios, that can be a daunting task considering you have to cater for all the conditions. That is almost like you have to re-write the whole program on your wrapper and do all the data validations.

If you are using QAD MFG/PRO prior to eB, your sample database may not have the database areas nicely partitioned for you. This is largely due to the fact that those versions were created under Progress V8 and it did not have database areas. In the later version of MFG/PRO, QAD has made an effort to group the database tables into database areas and that makes the application much faster especially when running processes like the MRP.

You will notice that large tables are seperated into different areas and you can place them strategically to enhance your system performance. Of course if you have stripping of your disks, it may not have that much impact.

If you have a system that does not come with pre-defined database areas or you have upgraged from V8 to V9 or V10, you may want to consider re-arranging your database tables into different areas to improve your system performance. Before doing that, you need to analyse your database to know the sizes of each database table and the nature of transactions or access. Then you can re-group them and allocate the appropriate number of areas you need. For example, try to split the heavy transactional tables into different areas and balance them out.

In our operations, it is common to have reports that takes more than 10 minutes to run. It is quite common that these reports are sent to bacth job and process in the background. However, many users may find it troublesome to have to monitor the jobs that they’d sent.

Here is one way to resolve these issues. If you are using UNIX, you can create a simple Shell Script that captures the output from your MFG/PRO report and using “sendmail” command to redirect the output to the email.

After you have created the script, please it into the printer setup and treat it as a printer.

This is a simple and effective solution that I had implemented for some of my customers running UNIX.

This article attempts to look into the backup options in using Progress RDBMS.

Progress RDBMS provides its own backup utility called “probkup”. There are companies that thinks that this backup utility is not very useful since it cannot be integrated into third party backup tools. I shall spend some effort to expand on the pros and cons of each under the Progress RDBMS environment.

Using OS Backup (pros and cons):

1. Can integrate into third party system management tools and use some of the powerfull features of the tools.

2. Become part of the overall Disaster Recovery solution that is 100% automated.

3. Does not depend on the Progress version used to backup. (In any case, there is still a need to use older version to access older version of Progress DB.) But to get the files back is much faster.

4. Speed of backup. Some tools provides accelerated copying by exploiting the OS native functions.

5. Cannot use Incremental Backup feature in Progress RDBMS tools.

6. No marking of backup. Needs special attentions in handling database changes (added extents, harddrive, relocationg of files etc) and AI, BI files.

7. Can’t integrated with Fathom Management.

8. Must reconstruct original DB Structure. Cannot restore into a different structure.

Using Progress “probkup”:

1. Native to Progress RDBMS, marks backup dates etc.

2. Databse structure changes is transparent. No worries about adding extents, changing structure, adding harddrive etc.

3. Tools / Options available to manage AI files, BI files easily.

4. Can tap on Fathom Management.

5. Restoring into different DB Structure is supported.

6. Lack of third party tools support and can be a pain in planning automatic Disaster Recovery Architecture. (Need to use Fathom – additional cost.)

Overall, I would still strongly recommend using “probkup” for most of the operations since it is still the most convenient way of doing backup. With the help of some OS Scripts, the backup process still can be automated and run smoothly in almost all operations.

Dear visitor,

Probase Consulting strives to provide the best services and solutions to all the clients. This blog is created to provide updates to different aspects of doing business as well as technological changes and impacts to businesses. In doing so, hopefully, clients or any other visitors to this blog will be able to benefit from the materials posted here. However, the materials posted here must not be construed as any kind of advisory materials. The materials here is purely for education purposes and to be used as reference only.

That said, Probase Consulting will do its very best to provide accurate information in the posts and will be frank and honest in giving opinions.

Thank You.

Sincerely,

Randy Sei ES