What About QAD Integration in ERP O3? It Gets Better!

by GARY YANG, Roundview Technologies

QAD has announced ERP O3, the next milestone of its ERP software with world-class infrastructure which promises efficiency, agility, resilience, and continuous adaptation.  One of the questions people often ask is:  What will happen to QXtend?  The simple answer is: QXtend will no longer be available in O3, as other Progress based QAD products.  The long answer, well, is what I am trying to get to here. 

Back in April when I was at the QAD Teamwork Partner Conference in Barcelona, Spain, I attended a great presentation on integration in ERP O3, by QAD VP for Consulting & Transformation Services, Carlos Garcia.  As a guy who worked on QAD integration projects for over two decades, I would say I am very pleased with what I have learned during that presentation and subsequent discussions with Carlos.

What is QAD O3 Integration Platform?  It is a toolset to design, build and execute integration.  Supporting true standard integrations, it enables low-code, no-code, and non-intrusive extensibility.  In ERP O3, this new Integration Platform not only replaces QXtend, but it also provides the infrastructure for the new QAD EDI as well.  With embedded Boomi iPaaS and O3 technologies, the new QAD integration platform will be an enabler for a partnership ecosystem as well:

QXtend has been around for over two decades and as a pioneer in QXtend implementations, I have to say it was a well-designed product, providing web service-based mechanism for creation of transactions in QAD, the event driven / scheduled data export and on-demand data inquiry from QAD.  It is not an easy task to replace it.  In AUX, some inbound functions of QXtend can be done with Channel Island JSON based interfaces, but there was no solution in AUX to do what QXtend Outbound does.  In the new QAD O3 Integration Platform, the event driven publishing mechanism called Event Stream is designed to handle this task with much improved robustness and extensibility:

The real time data inquiry is available in O3 platform (JSON interfaces available through HTTPS) and it does not go through this Boomi based O3 Integration Platform.

An important new O3 Integration feature worth mentioning is the Integration Monitor. One of the problems in many integration solutions today is the lack of visibility of the integration data / processing status to the business users. Very often experienced IT personnel must “babysit” the system to handle integration exceptions – the constraint of experienced IT resources and long wait time for business users when errors occur are not uncommon headache for management.

For this we have developed the Roundview Integration Portal (a browser based tool that works in conjunction with Boomi iPaaS, used by several QAD customers today) that empowers the business users so that they can view all integration data and errors and retry failed messages if needed.  In the new QAD O3 Integration Platform, the Integration Data Repository and Integration Monitor allow the business users to have visibility of the integration data and reprocess the data when exceptions occur.  This is a huge improvement over the current QXtend based QAD integration platform.

One would likely ask another question: we will be on AUX, or QAD EE / SE for a few years, what can we do?  You may have learned the concept that AUX is the pathway to ERP O3.  Similarly, with O3 Integration Platform providing (backward) support for QXtend SI interfaces, integrating your QAD ERP with third party software systems using QXtend, Boomi and Roundview Integration Portal provides scalability and efficiency for your enterprise today, and help you get ready for QAD ERP O3 in the future.

*Screenshots were taken from presentation by Carlos Garcia.