Seeking to address mounting product quality concerns among manufacturers and their customers, Exact Software North America LLC this week announced a partnership that will add a new quality management and compliance application to Exact’s JobBOSS shop floor manufacturing system.
At its Engage 2008 user conference in Las Vegas, Exact announced the partnership with CEBOS under which Exact’s JobBOSS direct sales force has begun to offer the CEBOS MQ1 quality management application. Under the terms of the partnership, the CEBOS application has been integrated with the JobBOSS system, which is designed for job shops — small and medium-size make-to-order, engineer-to-order, contract, and mixed-mode manufacturers.
Exact also used the conference to unveil a new version of its Macola ERP system that supports Microsoft’s Vista operating system and the SQL Server 2005 database server.
The integration of JobBOSS and CEBOS’ MQ1 system will help Exact’s customers more easily comply with ISO and Six Sigma quality standards, respond to quality regulations, and share up-to-date quality information with customers. MQ1 manages quality documents, records non-conformances, and tracks corrective and preventive actions. It also helps organizations maintain equipment by tracking preventive maintenance records, and it includes analytics that help enterprises assess their quality programs.
Exact and CEBOS have already completed an initial integration of the two systems, said JobBOSS Director of Development Dan Deanovic in an interview with Managing Automation. The integration allows MQ1 to tap into customer, material, job, and work order information managed by JobBOSS. The integration also supports a single sign-on to both systems, and is expected to be enhanced over time, Deanovic said.
Although JobBOSS itself supports some limited quality management functionality, manufacturers have been pushing for more because their own customers have been demanding more quality information. “Many of our customers are building high-tolerance products, and they are having quality standard compliance thrust upon them,” Deanovic said.
The addition of MQ1 will allow JobBOSS users to easily share failure and corrective action information with customers while jobs are in process, he said.
Exact had considered developing enhanced quality management software on its own, the company revealed. “We did consider it, but CEBOS has the best offering, and they made it easy because the integration [with JobBOSS] was straightforward,” said Harry Merkin, Exact’s vice president of marketing.
About 50 of Exact’s 4,000 JobBOSS customers currently use the MQ1 product, which, according to CEBOS, is sold to manufacturers in aviation, telecommunications, healthcare, automotive, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and defense industries.
JobBOSS customers will need to license the MQ1 product separately. Exact will take responsibility for supporting instances of MQ1 sold under the partnership to JobBOSS users, Merkin said.
Separately, Exact unveiled the latest release of its Macola ES ERP application. Macola ES v9.5 is the first Macola release to support Windows Vista and SQL Server 2005. It also supports the most recent release of the Crystal Reports reporting application from Business Objects.
The latest Macola release does not feature any functional improvements in the application, Merkin said. Using new platforms, however, customers will receive improved security and usability, he said.
Crystal Reports XI, Business Objects’ latest version, adds features such as dynamic cascading prompts. That feature ties user prompts directly to updated database fields, making Crystal Reports easier to use, Exact officials said.