Solution
Since the company was established in 1986, ISS Group has consistently embraced innovation—evolving from a distributor in the 80’s to a leader in web-enabled technology today. Over its 25+ years in the industry, ISS Group has maintained its commitment to excellence and providing its customers with the best solutions to meet their challenging business needs.
Through the mid to late 80’s, ISS Group realized tremendous success and rapid business growth as a distributor of Progress OpenEdge-based solutions, at one point tripling its revenue in just 18 months. By the mid 90’s, ISS Group (part of BDO Seidman at the time) attracted the attention of QAD — a leading provider of enterprise applications for global manufacturing companies and a Progress Software partner. The two companies teamed up, and ISS Group became one of QAD’s first resellers in the U.S. “We had a staff of 20-25 progress developers at that point on staff. So it just made sense to leverage our existing investment in progress,” explains Andrew Weinstein, CEO of ISS Group. The relationship quickly evolved, as QAD looked to ISS Group for more than just distribution. At the time, well before the Internet became main stream, QAD wanted to develop an e-commerce strategy and asked ISS Group if they were interested in web enabling. “We said absolutely,” explains Weinstein. “And using Progress OpenEdge, we developed a web development platform product called eFramework™, which has been re-branded as iFramework™. Using iFramework we developed the first QAD B2B e-commerce application jointly with QAD in 1996 called MFG/ PRO on the Web: Trading Partner Transactions (TPT).”
The TPT solution allowed new and existing QAD customers to web-enable their QAD ERP systems (then known as MFGPro), and allows their customers to perform real-time self-service e-commerce transactions over the web, such as order entry/status and stock status inquiry. Some of QAD’s largest customers have implemented the TPT solution, including Eaton, Ingersoll Rand, GE Lighting, Johnson & Johnson, and Tyco just to name a few. ISS Group continues to support the TPT product to this day.