Hoping to appeal to manufacturers poised to rebound from the recent economic contraction, QAD Inc. this week announced the latest version of its enterprise application suite, with upgrades that promote training and usability to help employees adapt to recent organizational changes, including downsizing, plant closings, and the need to do more with less, the company said. QAD Enterprise Applications 2009.1, which spans financials, customer management, manufacturing scheduling, supply chain collaboration, enterprise asset management, and analytics, has been retooled to add more workflows, automated help, and business intelligence for the everyday user, according to officials. A new function called easy onboarding aims to help employees learn the software’s processes more intuitively. The latest version offers scripted, "follow the bouncing ball" type instructions to walk people through the various areas of the application, including multi-currency functions, compliance standards, and safety and regulatory requirements by country and by industry. When manufacturers make workforce cuts, they also lose the individual know-how of the people behind the processes. Automating the instructions and incorporating multimedia training sessions to help new hires get up to speed offsets the imbalance, the company said. Similarly, QAD is also enhancing its process mapping technology to provide a high-level schematic of a process flow, such as quote-to-cash. Within the 2009.1 interface, a user can drill down into a particular part of the process for a more detailed view of functional flows and even the vendors involved. “It’s an interactive map that is going from the process flow to functional flow, [such as] what the product does and [how] to execute it,” said Gordon Fleming, QAD’s chief marketing officer, in an interview. The user interface was also an important area of focus, Fleming said. Last year, QAD Enterprise Applications 2008 was said to be built for a new generation of users who are familiar with social networking tools and sophisticated graphics, and this year’s release expands on that initiative. For example, the enhanced interface includes the ability to chat with other users within an application space. While it is not full Web 2.0 technology, it does provide a greater ability for users to interact, Fleming said. In 2009.1, QAD has worked to empower end users so that they don’t have to depend as much on the IT department. To that end, an additional capability called operational metrics enables any user to define KPIs specific to his or her part of the business and receive information and alerts based on those metrics. The new capabilities in version 2009.1 are meant to help companies execute on their business faster and more efficiently despite the current economic conditions, officials said. “We are giving people better access to data, better usability, and better tools for them to adapt to the crisis right now,” Fleming said. All of the new functionality is based on feedback from customers. Over the last year the company has surveyed its installed base, accumulating information from more than 500 respondents. Based on that information, QAD is gearing its R&D efforts toward making its application suite easier to deploy and use. The software is available in both on-premise and on-demand versions, but economic conditions have prompted a significant uptick in the adoption of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, with speed to deployment a high priority, Fleming said.