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QUALITY ENGINEERED
SYSTEMS LTD. PRODUCT TRACKING AND MANAGEMENT NEWS VOLUME 3, No 1 , 2007 |
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Welcome back to ONTRACK. It’s been
a busy winter here at QES, with upgrades, new projects and lots of new developments. The winter weather is finally behind us,
we hope, and we are now into our spring travel schedule. We will have teams heading north and south
in the near future to either start up new systems or upgrade older
systems. 2006 saw a number of our
older pre-Y2K systems update to the latest edition of BLACKBIRD and by all
accounts everyone is happy with the improvements we have added. That trend is continuing as we maintain
our efforts to make sure our clients have the latest and most powerful tools
possible for their product tracking needs. It’s easy to see where one of the industries main
cost concerns is these days - managing the seemingly never ending spiral of
cost increases in the transportation sector.
We have had numerous requests for systems to improve management of
transportation costs, particularly in the realm of demurrage reductions and
fleet management. The BLACKBIRD
transportation management modules are now responsible for millions of dollars
of transportation savings annually. The waves of consolidation that are sweeping
through the P & P industry these days certainly tend to play havoc with
our planning and scheduling here but as a long time supplier to the industry,
we see it as an absolute necessity to ensure the long term viability of the
North American industry. While from a
supplier’s perspective, it may seem troubling to see the number of
independent paper companies declining, the merged companies are usually much
stronger and more capable of adapting to the challenges of the global
marketplace. These companies then
require far more capable and flexible IT systems to support their management,
and that requirement is what keeps driving QES to provide ever more
functionality in BLACKBIRD.. Several significant milestones were observed in
late 2006. QES celebrated its 15th
anniversary as a systems supplier to the P&P industry and in the same
month a recent shop floor installation had its 12 month of downtime free
operation! Both significant events to
the staff here at QES. |
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1991 to 2006 QES celebrated its 15th anniversary late
in 2006. Back in 1991, with more years
of bale tracking experience than most anyone in the industry, Rick Andrews
started QES with a belief that he had a better way to manage pulp
tracking. From that focused beginning, QES has grown to a
company with a global presence, with software running on 4 continents
spanning a broad spectrum of industries.
The first two systems were installed as joint ventures with another
local BC software firm and after that, QES began a period of rapid growth as
an independent supplier of pulp manufacturing execution systems. Over the next few years, the company grew
to the point where it outgrew the original offices and the current building
was purchased by QES to house the rapidly growing company that was becoming a
recognized force in pulp and paper software development. During this period the development focus
was on expanding functionality, moving up to current development environments
and generally adding value to QES products for our clients. The Y2K phenomena spawned another period
of rapid growth and activity as IT Managers around the world used the
opportunity to not only take care of the Y2K problem but also to build better
software infrastructure for their companies. From the earliest days, QES saw that its future as
a company would require a razor sharp focus on customer service, customer
value, and a culture of constant innovation as keys to continued growth. This has driven QES to develop powerful new
products as it moved into the paper and roll based industries and built partnerships
with other software industry leaders. QES now is continuing this drive to keep providing
our clients with software that delivers more power and more value than
before. |
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qMunicator &
Communications Made Easy And Error Free |
Automated Communications with qBiz Last issue, qBizConnector was introduced as a new
product from QES. It was several
years in development as our analysts and designers worked to build a product
that could be easily used by mill IT staff to easily manage interfaces
between disparate systems. There are
packages out there that do that work but they are universally complex,
expensive and difficult to use. qBiz
has been a tremendous success and is now used for interfacing tasks at all of
our new installations and is being offered to clients as a full fledged
middleware package to work with all their systems. It is now taking flight as the base for a
communication package, qMunicator, offered to automate the often
tedious and error-prone job of faxing,
emailing, printing or otherwise providing clients or service providers with
important documentation such as shipment departure notifications, quality
certificates, or shipping documentation. qMunicator, with qBiz as
its engine,
manages all these activities, including EDI transmissions,
completely in the background, freeing up staff for more productive
activities. qMunicator first
installation was in a paper mill in 2006 and will be starting up in another
in Q2 of this year in a board mill in the Eastern States. This second install
is significant in that qMunicator was chosen as the simplest and
most cost effective method of acquiring this capability even though the mill
does not yet use the BLACKBIRD system.
In this application, qMunicator will be used to pull data from a
legacy application and generate professional looking reports in a way that
was never possible before. |
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Graphical Warehouse Management
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WAREHOUSE MAPPER Pulp and Paper warehouse staff have for years used the
venerable white board to keep track of what is in the warehouse and where it
is located. Its an effective, visual
approach but was limited in its application. Every change in the warehouse meant the board had to be
updated, then the warehouse records, then the shipping department had to have
the information. The information
chain was long, complex and error prone.
And the effectivenss of the source data, the board, was very much
dependent on how neat the writing was. Mapper from QES changed all that and brought an
effective easy to use solution to the problem. With Mapper, all product movements in the warehouse
are completed with a click of the mouse.
New product coming into the warehouse is displayed automatically. All movements are tracked in the Mapper
database and all documentation is kept absolutely current. Furthermore, as soon as someone records a
movement in Mapper, everyone in the organization has the information
available to them instantly. . Contact QES to learn more about these new and
exciting products or to schedule a web demo for your site.
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Formal Agreement With Greycon |
Closer Ties with an Industry Leader After several years of working closely with Greycon
and making their X-Trim package work seamlessly with BLACKBIRD, it is with great
pleasure that QES can announce a formal representation partnership with
Greycon. Our offices in Greycon is the developer and supplier of the
industries leading packages for Trim Optimization (X-Trim and ReTrim) and
Finite Capacity Scheduling (S-Plan).
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THE QES TEAM |
Our Team Leader Doug Young is perhaps the embodiment of what QES strives
to present to our clients, competent, professional and courteous (to clients
anyway). Doug has been with QES for over 10 years and is our
Development Manager as well as the sounding board for all the bright ideas
our designers come up with. Doug came to QES from a communications company that
developed and implemented communications software for MS-DOS (remember that?)
and early Windows platforms. A long
time resident of the Doug quickly settled into his role as a Senior
Software Designer and led QES teams on many critical projects in the
90’s. His calm approach and no
nonsense attitude ensured that his projects proceed steadily, quickly and on
budget to the finish. This professional approach to projects
soon had Doug leading projects as a Project Manager and on to his current
responsibility as Development
Manager. Clients appreciated his calm, deliberate approach
to problem solving and his willingness to patiently explain complex issues so
they are understandable is legendary. Away from the office, Doug is a mainstay of one of
the local Old-Timers Hockey teams and enjoys skiing and mountain biking with
his son. Doug is also one of many
cyclists on the
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The Next Frontier QES is again moving into new territory, this time
its off to the far east and the region with the fastest growing paper
industry in the world – QES has established a relationship with Chinese
company based in The company we are allied with, while not
specifically in the software industry, are very well known at the highest
levels on many paper companies in several of the major paper making
provinces. Already, the relationship
has generated requests for proposals, frequent product showcases, and
generally lots of excitement here at QES.
The move into More on this in a future edition of ONTRACK. |
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INDUSTRY NEWS |
An interesting development in the Canadian Pulp and
Paper industry took place in early 2007.
An operating pulp mill in Meadow Lake Saskatchewan was purchased by
Asia Pulp and Paper, one of the largest paper producers in This purchase marks the third purchase in recent
years of a North American pulp operation by an Asian buyer, presumably to
lock up the fiber supply for the rapidly expanding paper industry in
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To contact QES via the postal system,
send your comments to: The onTrack Editor, |
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