SANTA BARBARA, Calif- QAD Inc. (Nasdaq: QADA) (Nasdaq: QADB), a leading provider of flexible, cloud-based enterprise software and services for global manufacturing companies, today announced that Kinnerton Confectionery, Britain’s largest independent manufacturer of chocolate and novelty confectionery, has chosen QAD Demand Planning and QAD Production Planning in the cloud.

In 1978, Kinnerton became the first brand to manufacture and sell chocolate in the shape of children’s characters in the United Kingdom. Headquartered in London, it is currently the fifth largest chocolate producer in Britain. With manufacturing sites in Fakenham, Norfolk and Sherburn-in-Elmet, Yorkshire, a distribution center at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, a sales office in Australia and a technical office in Hong Kong, the company employs approximately 1,000 people. Kinnerton manufactures in a nut-safe environment and sells licensed, branded and private-label products to major supermarket chains as well as to regional and discount retailers across the United Kingdom. It is one of Britain’s leading producers of seasonal goods including popular licensed children’s characters such as Peppa Pig, My Little Pony and Thomas & Friends. Kinnerton is a subsidiary of Zertus GmbH.

Kinnerton has used QAD’s Food and Beverage ERP solution since 1996 and recently upgraded to the latest edition of QAD Enterprise Applications. During the course of the Customer Engagement process with QAD, Kinnerton explored the possibility of using QAD supply chain solutions to help it better cope with the frequent changes in demand, promotions and seasonality that make forecasting challenging for food and beverage companies. Kinnerton relied primarily on spreadsheets and switching to QAD will enable the company to forecast more accurately while reducing inventory levels and improving service levels.

“As Kinnerton has grown, we realized that we need more robust business planning and to improve the way we forecast demand and plan production,” said Matthew Davies, IT director at Kinnerton parent company Zertus UK. “With the QAD Demand Planning and QAD Production Planning solutions, we will be agile and responsive while reaping the benefits of having a fully integrated demand and production planning tool. This new solution is being introduced to support the introduction of a Sales and Operations Planning process and will help to improve visibility across the supply chain, improve factory efficiency and reduce overall lead times. We will be able to forecast and plan far more efficiently than before.”

QAD Demand Planning provides memory-resident planning and simulation which enables rapid evaluation of planned promotions or new product introductions and promotes timely response to demand fluctuations. QAD Production Planning helps manufacturers optimize production plans in order to maximize efficiency and better meet customer needs. It gives users the ability to plan collaboratively and includes decision support capabilities to visualize, analyze, simulate and understand production requirements and capacities.

Kinnerton selected the QAD solutions for a number of reasons including:

• QAD supply chain solutions integrate seamlessly with QAD Enterprise Applications
• QAD’s longstanding relationship with Kinnerton
• QAD’s proven customer results in the food industry

“Kinnerton has been a QAD customer for quite a while, and during that time, there have been changes to their business that gave us the opportunity to help them evolve in ways that improved their growing company,” said JC Walravens, vice president of QAD EMEA. “It’s gratifying to see customers use QAD integrated products in conjunction with QAD Enterprise Applications to get the best out of their business. Like a lot of our customers, Kinnerton saw the advantages of the cloud.”