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.
