Quality Assurance department users at manufacturing company Advanced Energy Industries Inc. (Fort Collins, CO) really could have been jealous. Installation of a SAP R/3 corporate software suite on an HP 9000 computing platform had enabled the company's financial and operations departments to move from their offline, homegrown systems to a centralized, high performance ERP system.
But the QA department had not seen similar benefits from the system, which was provided by global alliance partners Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA) and SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany). Instead, Advanced Energy's QA users had continued using familiar, but cumbersome, manual methods to acquire the quality-related data they needed to prepare weekly and monthly reports to document Advanced Energy's ISO and other QA requirements.