Sub-second analytical, regulatory, and operational reports against years of closed-period QAD data — without depending on a live Progress OpenEdge instance. PPAP lot genealogy, 21 CFR Part 11 audit trails, multi-year manufacturing analytics. Works with Tableau, Power BI, OTBI, BI Publisher.
QAD Reporting Framework and Progress 4GL reports compete with online users for the same database — and they don't scale to multi-year analytics.
Every mid-sized QAD instance hits the same wall around year five. Reports that used to run in 30 seconds now run in 30 minutes. Multi-year trend dashboards crash MRP. The Progress 4GL developer who wrote the report has retired. And the business is asking harder analytical questions — yield trends across plants, supplier-quality scorecards across multiple years, OEE rollups by product family — that QAD Reporting Framework was never designed to answer.
Syntra ETL's QAD historical reporting layer solves this by separating concerns. Live operational queries continue on QAD for current data. Analytical, trend, and multi-year queries run against a cloud-native columnar archive — Parquet partitioned by fiscal year, domain, site, and item-class — with the query engine of your choice (Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or our managed engine). The result: zero impact on QAD production performance, sub-second query response, and full BI-tool compatibility.
For manufacturers in regulated verticals — automotive under IATF 16949, pharma under 21 CFR Part 11, defense under ITAR — the historical reporting layer also serves as the system of record during inspection. Pre-built PPAP lot-genealogy reports, FDA Part 11 audit-trail extracts, and ITAR-controlled access traces ship out of the box, with role-based access and immutable read logging acceptable to inspectors.
Out-of-the-box templates against the QAD historical archive — customise or extend in your BI tool of choice.
Period trial balance per entity per ledger drawn from archived gl_hist, drillable to journal line and original sub-ledger source. Year-over-year variance, multi-period rollup, ChartField analyser all native.
Historical AP voucher and AR invoice aging snapshots from ap_hist and ar_hist, by vendor/customer, with payment-status timeline — for SOX, IRS, and HMRC audit retention.
Full lot/serial trace across 15+ years for IATF 16949 Element 14 evidence. Finished-good serial → component lots → supplier PO → vd_mstr in sub-second response.
Pharma/medical batch genealogy, electronic-signature audit trail, deviation history, IQ/OQ/PQ records — FDA Part 11 compliant with immutable read logging.
Multi-year OEE, yield, scrap, throughput trends across plants and product families drawn from wod_det and tr_hist — Tableau and Power BI dashboards out of the box.
Multi-year supplier non-conformance, on-time delivery, quality trends from vd_mstr/po_mstr/qad_qm. Customer revenue trends, payment behaviour, returns from cm_mstr/so_mstr/ar_hist.
From archive go-live to BI dashboards live in production — typical timeline 4–8 weeks.
Discovery engine inventories every report in production use: QAD Reporting Framework definitions, custom .p file reports, Crystal Reports built against QAD, Excel macros pulling from QAD. Each classified by frequency of use, business value, and retain/rebuild/retire decision.
Pre-built QAD extractors pull every required table — pt_mstr, gl_hist, wod_det, tr_hist, ap_hist, ar_hist, in_mstr — partitioned by fiscal year, domain, site, item-class. Output to cloud object storage as Parquet with embedded schema and JSON Schema sidecar.
SQL (JDBC/ODBC) and REST endpoints provisioned. Choice of query engine (Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or Syntra managed). Role-based access configured per data domain. Sensitive-field masking applied for ITAR, PII, and pricing data.
Critical reports rebuilt in target tooling — OTBI for ad-hoc analytics, BI Publisher for pixel-perfect operational reports (work-order travelers, PPAP packages, shop packets), Tableau/Power BI for executive dashboards, BI Publisher for OEM-PPAP submissions.
Sample reports run side-by-side: QAD live vs Syntra historical reporting. Reconciliation pack issued. BI tool integration tested. Users trained. Production cut to Syntra for analytical reporting; QAD retains live operational reports only.
Manufacturer-specific outcomes from the first 90 days post-go-live.
Multi-year variance analysis and consolidations that ran for hours on QAD Reporting Framework return in seconds — accelerating finance close by 3–7 days per period.
SOX, IRS, IATF 16949 PPAP, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 extracts ready on demand. Auditor productivity up 3–5x; internal-audit team time freed for higher-value work.
Multi-year OEE, yield, scrap, supplier-quality trends finally accessible. Manufacturing improvement programs informed by 5+ years of data, not just last quarter's snapshots.
Tier-1 OEM emergency lot-genealogy requests answered in minutes, not days. Recall investigation timelines slashed; customer-satisfaction metrics with key OEMs improve directly.
Business users connect Tableau, Power BI, Looker directly to the archive without IT involvement. Backlog of report-build requests against the Progress 4GL team disappears.
Analytical reports off the live QAD instance means MRP runs faster, online users see better response times, and QAD batch windows shrink. Operational longevity extended by years.
QAD historical reporting is the ability to run analytical, regulatory, and operational queries against years of closed-period QAD data — work-order genealogy, financial trial balances, on-hand inventory snapshots, supplier non-conformance history — without depending on a live QAD database. Manufacturers need a dedicated solution because QAD's native reporting tools (QAD Reporting Framework, Progress 4GL reports, Crystal Reports built against the OpenEdge schema) become slow, brittle, and skill-bottlenecked as data volumes grow. By year 7 in a typical QAD instance, gl_hist and wod_det reporting queries that ran in 30 seconds now run in 30 minutes, and the Progress 4GL developer who wrote the report has retired. Syntra ETL's historical reporting layer fixes both problems: cold data in cloud-native columnar storage with sub-second query response, exposed through standard SQL/REST.
QAD Reporting Framework (QRF) is a runtime layer that executes reports against the live operational QAD Progress OpenEdge database — it competes with online users and MRP for the same database resources. Syntra ETL's historical reporting layer separates analytical and historical queries onto a dedicated archive backed by Parquet in cloud object storage, queried through a scalable engine (Athena, BigQuery, Snowflake, Spark, or our managed query service). Operational reports stay on QAD for live data; analytical, trend, and multi-year reports run against the archive. Result: faster reports, zero impact on production QAD, and the ability to bring tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Looker to the data without exposing the operational system.
Yes — this is the primary use case for the Syntra historical reporting layer post-decommission. After QAD is shut down, the archive remains queryable for the full retention window (7 years for SOX/IRS, 15 years for IATF 16949 PPAP, up to 30 years for pharma 21 CFR Part 11). Auditors run trial balance and AP/AR aging queries; OEM quality engineers run PPAP lot-genealogy traces; FDA inspectors run electronic-signature audit-trail queries. All against archived data — no live QAD instance required. Customers typically save 70–90% of the original QAD TCO while retaining full reporting and audit access.
Yes. During migration, Syntra ETL's discovery engine inventories every QAD Reporting Framework report, every custom .p file report, and every Crystal Report built against the QAD schema. Reports identified as still-needed are rebuilt in modern tooling (OTBI, BI Publisher, Tableau, Power BI) against the archive — same data, same business logic, but vastly faster execution and richer visualisations. Reports identified as obsolete or duplicates are retired. The original report definitions are preserved in the archive's customization catalog so a future auditor can see the exact report layout a closed period was originally signed off on.
Automotive PPAP submissions and recall investigations both require lot-genealogy queries: given a finished-good serial number, trace back through wo_mstr → wod_det component lots → tr_hist receipt records → original supplier PO → vd_mstr supplier — sometimes across 15 years of history. On a live QAD instance these queries take hours and impact MRP runs. The Syntra historical reporting layer pre-materializes the genealogy graph during archival, so a full lot-trace returns in sub-second time. The result is exportable directly as a PPAP-compliant report (Element 14 traceability) or formatted for IATF 16949 audit submission. Customers use this for both routine PPAP renewals and emergency recall investigations.
Yes. Life sciences manufacturers under FDA 21 CFR Part 11 need to produce historical evidence on demand: electronic signature audit trails, batch-record lot genealogy, deviation history per product, training records per operator, equipment qualification (IQ/OQ/PQ) records, and supplier audit history. The Syntra archive preserves the full QAD record (including signature artifacts and audit-trail tables), exposes them through role-partitioned access, and produces immutable read-audit-logs acceptable to FDA Part 11 inspectors. Standard inspector extracts (batch genealogy, deviation report, training compliance) ship as pre-built saved queries.
Most operational queries — single-period GL detail for one entity, AP voucher detail by vendor, work-order traveler for one WO, lot genealogy for one serial number — return sub-second. Multi-year trend reports against billion-row gl_hist or wod_det aggregations typically return in 5–30 seconds depending on partitioning and the query engine in use. Year-over-year manufacturing dashboards (throughput, yield, scrap, OEE) that take 20+ minutes on a live QAD instance return in under a minute against the columnar archive. Customers commonly pre-materialize an analytical layer (period trial balances, daily on-hand snapshots, monthly OEE rollups) for instant access.
Yes. The Syntra archive exposes a standard SQL interface (JDBC/ODBC), so any BI tool that connects to a relational database — Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Qlik, MicroStrategy, ThoughtSpot — works without modification. There's also a REST API for programmatic access and warehouse-native connectors for Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and Redshift. Pre-built dashboards for common QAD analytical patterns (manufacturing performance, supplier scorecard, customer revenue trends, GL trend analysis) ship as starter templates. Customers typically have core dashboards live within 2–3 weeks of archive go-live.
30-minute discovery call. We'll walk through your QAD reporting inventory, regulatory obligations (IATF 16949, 21 CFR Part 11, ITAR), and target BI stack — and produce a concrete rebuild plan.