Learn more about Excel Loaders for QAD.

Learn more about Excel Loaders for QAD.

Extension Workbench not just allows you to define additional fields to virtually any QAD table, but also provides a great capability for massively managing the additional data from convenient Excel Spreadsheet. Once hosted within QAD ERP, the new data provide reliable foundation for accurate reporting, process improvement and excellent support for making the right decision. This article explains how Extension Workbench can improve the data management and enhance your operations.

With rare exceptions, QAD users want to store more data in QAD ERP than it can accommodate. It would be very helpful to have few additional fields in existing tables or even maintain completely new datasets. Below are some examples what QAD users want:

- Miscellaneous Item attributes. These are supplier or industry specific info related to raw material items or some additional info characterizing finish good items.

- Extended Supplier information. These could be additional contact person’s details email address, phones faxes, etc, staff remarks, indicators whether the supplier is approved or not, etc.

- Extended Customer information
- Extended Supplier Item attributes
- Extended Customer Item attributes
- Any other datasets of your choice.

Of course, all this information can be stored outside of QAD system, in MS Excel spreadsheets, or in locally built MS Access database, or else where. However, having this information within QAD ERP will bring great benefits:

1) You achieve the data integrity. Once integrated with QAD ERP – it becomes part of QAD ERP, which already resides in rock-solid enterprise database, is being backed up, highly available, etc., unlike bunch of files scattered across user PC’s.

2) You’ll be able to easily utilize the additional information in QAD Reports, Cyberquery reports, dashboards, .NET UI browses, inquiry screens, etc. When stored outside of QAD, it’s much harder to create reliable reports and maintain clean data, i.e. slows down your processes.

3) Data consistency and accuracy. You will be able to properly maintain the new data. There is an ability to apply QAD validation rules, for example selected field only accepts valid Item Master codes of type “Finished Good”, etc. This will lead to data accuracy and reliability. This will allow avoiding data errors, and producing much cleaner reports supporting your business decisions.

Let’s have a look into Extension Workbench itself.

Use “Dataset Maintenance” menu in QAD, to define new fields and/or tables in QAD. This menu is part of 32 Soft Extension Workbench for QAD, it provides flexibility to outline all the details of the new dataset.

As you will see in this video, Extension Workbench Excel Loader allows you easily to maintain any of the datasets defined in “Dataset Maintenance”.

In conclusion
Extension Workbench is a great tool for expanding QAD functionality by accommodating additional data in QAD ERP, WITHOUT revamping your existing QAD ERP system, WITHOUT progress programming and WITHOUT changing QAD Database structure. Yet, Extension Workbench provides powerful capability to massively create / update / delete thousands of supplementary clean data records, validated against business logic of your choice. The new supplementary data become an integral part of your QAD ERP, which will be automatically carried forward to all your consequent QAD versions in the future. Extension Workbench helps you to streamline sophisticated processes; it increases the value of QAD software and directly contributes to your bottom line.

Learn more about Excel Loaders for QAD.

Usually QAD users maintain thousands of master comments in QAD ERP 1.12. These comments are printed on internal and outbound QAD documents, such as Purchase Orders, Work Order tickets, Sales Invoices, Schedules, etc. These massive comment records should be revised and updated periodically. Also hundreds of new comments should be created on a daily basis.

For example, one of our customers had to maintain certain instructions for each supplier to be included into Purchase Orders. With Master Comment Excel Loader they easily create such instructions by copy-pasting comments from similar supplier’s instructions. By the way, our customer uses another our product Replenishment Workbench for generating QAD Purchase Orders and emailing them automatically to suppliers at once. The released PO’s have appropriate instructions inserted and printed into the body of the documents.

In conclusion, Master Comments Excel Loader 1.12 has been designed to automate dataset maintenance, minimizing labor effort and errors.

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Often secondary entities have either their own domains in QAD or separate QAD databases, use different QAD versions, can have different currencies and/or located in multiple countries.

To address this process QAD has functionality called Enterprise Material Transfer (EMT).

In a nutshell, when a sales order is created in the central entity (Primary Business Unit), it automatically generates purchase order and an electronic message for a distribution or manufacturing entity (Secondary Business Unit). This electronic message gets transferred and imported as a sales order into the secondary business unit (SBU). SBU manufactures the product and ships it either directly to customer or to the primary business unit (PBU). Shipment generates another message that gets imported into PBU and updates statues of EMT PO and SO there. Changes to EMT sales order between then moment it is created and shipped generate a set of messages that get exchanged between PBU and SBU and keep order in sync. Message export, transfer and import happens in batch mode using QAD EDI E-commerce module.

The idea behind EMT and its realization in QAD is great! It is targeted to eliminate manual double entry of sales orders, ensure data accuracy and transparency and, as a result, save company efforts and increase its efficiency.

However, technical implementation of QAD EMT solution has certain drawbacks that cause companies not to use this functionality. Here are some of them:

• EDI E-Commerce setup and maintenance. To be able to use standard QAD messaging logic EDI transformation maps need to be setup in E-commerce module. This requires IT expertise that is costly and might not be available on a short notice. Also company might not have EDI E-commerce as part of its QAD package and might be required to buy a separate license for it.
• Data exchange. If PBU and SBU databases are located on different servers company will need to have an engine to transfer files between servers either using its own resources or a third party. In either case it involves additional cost and potential communication problems.
• Error handling. Since EMT messaging processing happens in batch mode, error handling becomes painful. If EMT message import or export fails time and effort required to troubleshoot and fix the problem might be much greater than if orders were keyed in/updated manually.
• Low level of reliance.Because there are so many individual steps involved into EMT message communication, there is a big chance that something goes wrong and the whole processing will fail.
• Constant need in process support by IT. Any issues with data transformation or exchange can be resolved only by IT. In most of the cases users cannot identify without IT help the root cause of the issue. Often, IT help might not be available on demand, especially if EMT and EDI setup has been done by a third party as a one-time contract.

So, what QAD users do? In the best case scenario they replicate EMT process manually by doing double entry of sales orders. In the worst case scenario some of the orders exist only in PBU, some only in SBU some are duplicated and accounting process becomes a real challenge, not to mention lack of data transparency.

What is the alternative and how EMT can be done better?

We have an alternative solution for QAD EMT process that is based on our Excel Loader technology.  It:

• Eliminates the need in QAD EDI E-commerce module. Transformation of sales order into purchase order, sales order shipment into PO receipts and changes to SO into changes to PO integrated into our EMT loader.
• Includes data exchange engine. Our Excel loader technology eliminates a need in a separate engine to transfer data between different QAD servers.
• Improves error handling process. Simplified data exchanges process eliminates many of the errors that could be, otherwise, resolved only by IT. We also validate data before attempting to transfer them and during the load and return detailed and relevant error messages that could be easily interpreted by users.
• Removes reliance on IT in process support. Once underlying services are started on QAD servers by IT, our EMT loader is fully in the hand of the end users and does not require any IT involvement.
• Ensures data accuracy.
• Provides real-time statuses on EMT orders.
• Has a simple interface and is SOX compliant.

Our EMT Workbench allows users to create EMT sales order from Excel directly in PBU database/domain, export it into SBU, receive from SBU shipment information once order is shipped there and all this on a click of a button. It utilized to the full extent standard EMT functionality in QAD and gives user an easy and transparent way to work with it.

Below is a schema of EMT Workbench interaction with PBU and SBU QAD domains/databases

Data validation in EMT Workbench happens before attempting to create SO/PO. If, for example, order has been created in PBU and user attempts to export it in SBU, but item is not defined in SBU yet it will be highlighted in red in the workbench spreadsheet and error message displayed on it. User will know immediately what to do and what data to correct.

EMT Workbench has a built in EMT Tracking report where user can review transmission and shipment statuses for all open EMT sales orders.

Though we do not have released version EMT Workbench and are still working on its improvement, we are open to your questions, concerns and suggestions.

MFG/PRO outputs raw file (a file consisting of unreadable ascii codes), because of this users must identify the charset and the right font to use, this way the 32printer software can properly recognize and encode the file. By using notepad++, users can learn more about character settings and what are the best choices to output the file.

At this point the users can only identify the charset and not the font. For users to identify the fonts correctly, it will make some changes in the 32printer settings and test it using the software. The table below shows some of the combinations available for use:

To configure the language settings users will access the configuration files located at the directory ../ini. 32printer directory location may vary according to windows installation and network mapping. Users will modify each file and add the new parameters called –an which means alternative font name and –af  which means alternative font size. Check the table above for alternative name value.  Under each section called form there is a variable called PageParams this is where users will add the new  parameters –an and –af. The charset set in the outline will also be changed in accordance to language preferences and the correct (or preferred) fonts setting. Again check table for charset and font combination. Font value may vary as long as the value is under that charset. For example charset Big5 can be combined with fonts Yahei, SimSun or MingLiU, likewise GB2312 can be used as the charset.  One important ruling is that the value of –n which means font name is also changed with the same value of -af. This is strictly required for East Asian Language configurations. The name of the Font in the parameter –an strictly follow the ruling of case sensitivity and spelling. The exact name of font can be known through its properties in /windows/font directory. The fonts must also be available in the directory for the configurations to work.   The new parameters line will look similar to this;

[Korean form]
formName   = Report Test 80 Portrait Korean
template   = .\pdf\reptest.pdf
pageParams  =  -t 40 -l 20 -f 8 -s 12 -n "GulimChe" -Charset ksc5601 -z 90 -an "GulimChe" -af 8 

[Chinese form]
formName   = Report Test 80 Portrait Chinese
template   = .\pdf\reptest.pdf
pageParams =  -t 40 -l 20 -f 8 -s 12 -n 43 -z 90 -Charset gb2312 -an "Dotum" -af 7 -EmbedFonts

The setting above is the suggested configuration for East Asian Language, for Western European and other Non-English Languages there are some rulings to follow in which the –an and –af are omitted just like the default settings but charset the value is changed in accordance with the MFG/PRO language settings.   For example the known charset for German Language is Windows-1250. For more character settings users may access this site http://a4esl.org/c/charset.html.

Once the changes are made save and close the configuration files. Users have the option to save the file in different filenames for purpose of backup and for multi-language environment settings. With this setup 32printer can handle different language settings.

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QAD system security is a big part of what is impacted by SOX. System Administrators have to control user groups access to large number of QAD menus. The proposed Excel Loader tool has been designed to facilitate this process, allowing sys to visualize clearly the existing security settings and effectively make changes to the required areas of QAD security.

In addition to user groups, 36.3.10 Excel Loader also provides the list of individual users who belong to those groups, so sys admin can quickly check whether a certain person has access to the menus or not. You perform an audit for specific userid, downloading the complete list of menus the individual has access to.

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Learn more about Excel Loaders for QAD.

 
CWC is a secure Web Mobile Portal for sales reps, distributors, customers and other your partners who normally do not have access to your QAD system.
One stop site is designed to serve all your customer needs, while dramatically reducing CSR efforts answering calls or emails.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Easy-to-use web mobile system provides variety of functionality to your customers or partners: place and track orders, create and track quotes, create RMA requests, product availability inquiry, real time order status, invoice reprints, etc.
• CWC shortens the time orders are received and consequently the time it is processed.
• CWC eliminates confusions, errors and miscommunications.
• CWC can be operated via any existing PC or mobile device including iPhones, iPads, Android and Blackberries through the internet 24 x 7.
• CWC has customizable menus and functionality.

Contact us for more information or request a free trial.

What it can do for you? You will be able to:

Improve shipment process

Reduce shipping processing time.
Eliminate double entries, confusions and costly errors.
Eliminate shipments-without-billing scenarios.
Better control and visibility.
Automatically capture tracking number and shipping charges and record to QAD.
Automatically print shipping labels to Zebra and Laser printers.
Automatically validate shipping address.

Improve Order Entry in QAD

Find the Fastest Shipping at the Lowest Cost.
Verify Ship-to address on the fly to improve customer satisfaction.

For example Order Entry screen can be modified by adding a function to select carrier, ship-to, based on the order content and service type cost. Customer Service Representative will be able to view the frame with available Fedex/UPS services, like shown below, and select the required type.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│Service Type                   Est. Ship Time       Est. Ship Cost            │
│────────────────────────────── ──────────────────── ────────────────────      │
│UPS Three Day Select           09/30/2012           52.63 USD                 │
│UPS Second Day AIR AM          09/29/2012 10:30 AM  94.33 USD                 │
│UPS Second Day AIR             09/29/2012           82.01 USD                 │
│UPS Next Day Air Saver         09/28/2012 3:00 PM   173.27 USD                │
│UPS Next Day Air               09/28/2012 10:30 AM  181.58 USD                │
│PRIORITY_OVERNIGHT             09/28/2012 3:30 AM   61.33 USD                 │
│STANDARD_OVERNIGHT             09/28/2012 8:00 AM   108.94 USD                │
│FEDEX_2_DAY_AM                 10/01/2012 3:30 AM   55.46 USD                 │
│FEDEX_2_DAY                    10/01/2012 9:30 AM   48.22 USD                 │
│FEDEX_EXPRESS_SAVER            10/02/2012 9:30 AM   34.79 USD                 │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Track shipments from QAD Order screen

Your customer service team can browse order details with Fedex/UPS tracking details from a single QAD screen, while on the phone with customer.