Infor VISUAL vs. QAD Adaptive ERP

I struggle to identify a scenario where VISUAL is an appropriate solution. We used VISUAL because it was a legacy system and the cost/complexity of changeover seemed daunting. The user interface is poor as is the interconnectedness of the various screens and menus. This might be an acceptable piece of software for a continuous manufacturing environment with little variation of basic design, but we have had to write multiple add-on macros in order to get VISUAL to work effectively for us.

Incentivized

If you're setting up operations where you have to manage manufacturing builds from raw components to finished goods, I would recommend QAD. It's nice to have subassemblies part numbers for your builds and enter in the number of accepted quantities and rejects. QAD is very helpful if you have a lot of parts floating around. I would not buy QAD if you only have to manage less than ~20 parts... just use Excel.

Incentivized

• Infor Visual has a standard way of addressing business operations: sales orders, invoicing, reporting. It is easy to train operators used to using a manual or other ERP system.
• Material control is easy for production runs, R&D material lists and repairs. The process of receiving, issuing and returning material to inventory is facilitated by standard interfaces that are easily learned by material control operators.
• Engineering changes to bills of material are facilitated by the "engineering Master" flexible editing capability. The version control for the BOM's can be as detailed or vague as the process designed dictates. One item of a BOM or the entire BOM can be changed quickly and approved for production that day.

Incentivized

• The QAD Enterprise application is great, we only started using this application a few years ago. The Master Scheduling Workbench has been a great improvement to our daily operations.
• The Web-based QAD Supplier Portal has also been implemented recently in our company and has been a huge help to our purchasing and materials department.
• The QAD support that we receive has helped our company grow and is a major asset in upcoming projects.

Incentivized

• VTA has been extremely unreliable. I would not recommend it. It is not customizable at all. There is no logical way to handle shift differentials which is a huge issue with a company that runs 24/7.
• If you do not have a schedule set up, they cannot clock in. This poses a problem for anyone that gets called in on a shift they don't normally work on.

Incentivized

• Needs more flexibility to add/configure new indexes (if using the Progress Database) as the current indexes on key tables like transaction history are not helpful
• Need a better support system for the TMS/Precision interface
• Need better KnowledgeBase articles to understand the innerds of Pricing functionality

Incentivized

Good Technical and Customer Support during and after implementation tasks. Good Project Plan and Management support for implementation and post implementation. Financial functionality could be more comprehensive particularly with Budgeting and Cash Management. Inventory Management capability was adequate but could be more comprehensive as well. "Out of the Box" functionality was adequate but requested add-ons and enhancements seemed to be a bit pricey.

The cost / benefit of changing to a different ERP will create a high cost and low benefit that's why I believe that we'll continue renewing QAD for a long time.

Incentivized

Because of use cases and easy implementation and the vertical and horizontal scaling.

Incentivized

Easy to use, zero or minimum cost to maintain the database (DBA etc) , no issue with OS ( Linux), stable database

Incentivized

As we have seen the live environment and the use cases where we implement.

Incentivized

Could have used more hands-on approach. There are multiple webinars and information sessions but until you actually use the system, these are not very helpful.

Incentivized

We unfortunately did not evaluate any other ERP software. VISUAL was a legacy system and we determined that changing systems would be too difficult, and not cost effective. We reached out to our local VISUAL rep who knew how the software functioned, but not how to apply it more appropriately to our business model, so we continued on with what we had rather than looking elsewhere.

Incentivized

QAD is very easy to use once it's set up. It's basically an Excel sheet that can handle a lot more data points and faster. It's nice that you can dump the data stored in QAD to a CSV file and analyze in Excel. Careful narrow down the data searches to a limited number of points or Excel will crash. QAD is much easier to set up than Arena and SAP. And the numbering systems you can create in QAD is more customizable.

Incentivized

• I cannot comment on business impact.

Incentivized

• It help us to reduce the inventories (FG and RAW)
• It reduce the time to adjust to the constantly changing international customs laws

Incentivized