Stronger Together: ERP Upgrade Insights Powered by the QAD Community
Moderator: Scott Dulecki, Sr. Manager Enterprise Applications, Autokiniton

ERP transformation doesn’t happen in isolation. In this highly interactive session, customer panelists share how engagement with the QAD User Group community helped them navigate complex upgrade challenges, leverage best practices, and avoid common pitfalls. Featuring both on-stage and audience discussion, this session brings forward the collective intelligence of the community—delivering actionable insights you can take back to your organization.

Session Details

Session Details

AI Is Real. It’s Working. And It’s Changing the Game Now.
Speaker: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO

Kick off the event with a showcase of our Champion Trailblazers—manufacturers that have migrated to Adaptive ERP or implemented ChampionAI to drive real results. This session proves AI is practical, easier to deploy than expected, and delivering measurable financial impact today.

The Exponential Shift: Why AI Is Changing Manufacturing Faster Than You Think
Speaker: Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Founder of XPRIZE and Executive Founder of Singularity University

This high-impact session unpacks how AI and exponential technologies are rapidly reshaping manufacturing and outpacing traditional planning cycles. As cost pressures, disruption, and performance demands converge, incremental improvement is no longer enough. This session reframes the pace of change, creates urgency, and challenges leaders to adopt real-time, adaptive operating models to stay competitive.

Champions in Action: From Workflow to Outcome
Speakers: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO; Ron Davis, CAIO; Anam Rahman, VP of GTM - ChampionAI

This session shows how AI can be embedded directly into existing workflows to deliver immediate, practical value—without disruption. Through real-world examples, you’ll see how AI supports day-to-day operations and how it can be scaled over time within your current environment, making it easier to apply where it matters most.

From Complexity to Results: A Real Manufacturing Story
Speaker: QAD Customer

Hear directly from a manufacturer applying AI within live operations to drive measurable business results—without a large-scale, disruptive transformation. This session walks through the full journey, from the need for change to implementation, challenges faced, and the outcomes achieved post go-live.

Insight Isn’t Enough. Execution Is What Matters.
Speaker: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO

This session explores why AI investments often fall short—and how to fix it. Learn why true performance and financial impact come not from insight alone, but from how AI is applied within day-to-day execution. By reframing the role of AI from analysis to action, this session shows what needs to change to unlock meaningful results.

Speed, Visibility, and Winning
Speaker: Scottie Pippen, Six-time NBA Champion and Hall of Famer

This Q&A discussion will explore the leadership principles that separate good organizations from championship organizations, and why sustained success ultimately depends on helping people perform at their best.

Adaptive ERP: The Intelligent Backbone | How Manufacturers Modernize, Operationalize AI, and Build Systems of Action
Speaker: Amit Sharma, President, Manufacturing ERP

Many organizations have delayed modernization efforts because they believe the cost, complexity, and disruption outweigh the benefits. Others worry that modernization requires abandoning the business logic, workflows, and processes that make their organizations unique.

This session directly addresses those concerns by providing a practical modernization story built around real customer experiences, implementation lessons, partner expertise, and one of the most important innovations introduced during the event: Lynx Champion.

The session demonstrates what manufacturers can do today, how organizations are modernizing successfully, how customizations can be preserved, and how AI becomes operationalized within day-to-day execution and provides visibility into where the platform is headed so attendees understand both the immediate opportunity and the longer-term vision.

Speed to Value: Real Deployment Stories and the Operational Pace to Move Fast
Speaker: Sumit Sinha, Head of Applied AI

Learn how organizations are accelerating deployment timelines by aligning stakeholders, reducing complexity, and cutting through internal friction. This session covers the leadership decisions, operating models, and implementation approaches that help manufacturers skip the slow handoffs and deliver measurable outcomes in months, not years.

Champion Assist for Adaptive ERP & SRM
Speakers: Jennifer Fullerton, Director, Product Management - Manufacturing & ChampionAI; Can Koku, Product Manager - SRM

Explore how Champion Assist brings a natural language interface to QAD Adaptive ERP and QAD SRM - helping users query, navigate, and take action inside the core system without leaving their existing systems.

Inside Lynx Champion
Speaker: Chaitanya Josyula, Head of Product, Platform - ERP

Every manufacturer has years of ERP customizations that made perfect sense at the time, but they lack a clear picture of the cost to abandon them. That uncertainty doesn't just slow modernization down. It stops it entirely. Migration isn't the risk. Not knowing what you built is. This session shows what it looks like when Lynx finally makes the invisible visible.

What if your ERP could finally understand how your business really runs and talk to you about it?
Speaker: Simon Pioche, Director, Data Science & Process Intelligence

Across critical processes - Order to Cash, Accounts Payable, Production, and Maintenance - imagine simply asking what’s slowing down, where compliance is breaking, or why rework keeps happening. Instead of navigating ERP screens and Process Mining dashboards, an AI agent investigates your QAD ERP data, identifies the root causes, predicts what could happen next, and explains it in a conversation. This is where ERP stops just recording your processes and starts understanding them with you.

Stop Waiting for Year Three: Introducing the Champion Advantage Approach to Modernization
Speakers: Bryan Eldridge, Director, Professional Services; Waseem Safiri, Sr. Services Executive

Most manufacturers know they need to modernize. The harder question is where to start without putting production at risk. This session introduces QAD Champion Advantage, an AI-led transformation approach with four flexible entry points, starting with AI, building the business case, assessing technical readiness, or moving to full modernization, each designed to deliver value before asking you to go further. No leap of faith. No big-bang cutover. Just a clear path to a modern, adaptive enterprise at your own pace.

Redzone ChampionAI: Winning the Shift with AI-Native Frontline Operations
Speaker: Blake Strickland, VP of Product Management, Redzone

Explore how ChampionAI empowers frontline workers to win every shift. This session demonstrates how embedding real-time, conversational AI insights into daily huddles and standup operating rhythms removes shop-floor blind spots, accelerates machine troubleshooting, and bridges the gap between top-floor strategy and shop-floor execution to drive massive employee engagement and productivity.

Scaling Trade Compliance With AI: Every Champion Needs a Champion
Speaker: Joshua Guy, VP of Global Trade Compliance

Tariffs move, sanctions lists grow, origin claims get challenged and the answer has never been more headcount. The manufacturers winning here aren't out-hiring the complexity; they're giving their trade experts leverage. This session shows how QAD Global Trade Compliance brings ChampionAI into daily compliance work through our Trade Compliance Champion: classification recommendations that arrive with their rationale, trade documents read and validated automatically, and continuous screening against maintained lists.

Built-In, Not Bolted On: The New Era of Integrated Warehousing
Speaker: Jennifer Fullerton, Director, Product Management - Manufacturing & ChampionAI

Most manufacturers run their ERP and their warehouse like two separate worlds, one for the back office, one for the floor, and then spend enormous energy keeping them in sync. QAD's fully integrated Warehousing solution in Adaptive ERP tears down that wall for good. In this session, we'll show how QAD Warehousing brings intelligent material flow including smart putaway, demand-driven picking, automated replenishment, and real-time task management directly inside your ERP, with no separate WMS to bolt on, no data lag, and no reconciliation nightmares.

The Redzone Coaching Model : Fast results that stick!
Speakers: Lawrence Green, SVP of Sales, Redzone; Eric Jogun, VP of Coaching, Redzone

Software alone doesn't change a plant. People do. This session shows how Redzone coaching turns a software deployment into real, lasting results in your plant. Learn how hands-on coaching builds new habits, strengthens daily problem-solving, and helps frontline teams take ownership of performance in just 90 days. The result is more than a successful software launch. It's a new way of working that continues delivering results long after the initial coaching period has ended.

ChampionAI Architecture, Governance & Secure Enterprise Integration
Speakers: Dwarak Bakshi, VP of Engineering; Anand Chiddarwar, VP, Chief Architecture

Understand how ChampionAI operates across workflows, systems, and operational environments to create a connected system of action across the business.

Deployment Best Practices: From Pilot to Production
Speakers: Elaine Marshman, Director, Services Implementation Standards; Crystal Kuthoor, Implementation Manager

Learn the proven implementation strategies, governance practices, and change management approaches that help manufacturers move from successful AI pilots to enterprise-wide deployment with confidence.

The Integration Challenge: Integrating the QAD Portfolio with other systems, your path to Adaptive and the QAD Integration Platform
Speakers: Carlos García, VP Product Management - Integrations; Oscar Saavedra, Systems Architect Director

Learn how manufacturers integrate Adaptive, Redzone, supply chain workflows, and existing systems without disrupting operational continuity. Strategies for moving your integrations to Adaptive using the QAD Integration Platform.

From Signal to Action: How QAD is Rethinking Manufacturing Intelligence
Speakers: Chaitanya Josyula, Head of Product, Platform - ERP; Dwarak Bakshi, VP of Engineering; Anand Chiddarwar, VP, Chief Architecture

Every manufacturer has the same gap: the data is in the ERP, but the understanding isn't. This session covers the vision of how ChampionAI's capabilities work together as a platform, what makes it different from the AI your teams use today, and where it's going.

Connecting the Frontline with AI: Performance Gains for Supervisors and Operators
Speakers: Mark Sinnott, VP LE Coaching, Redzone; Alfred Carandang, VP, Continuous Improvement & Manufacturing Strategies, Ferrara; Zenas Chao, Operational Excellence Manager, Ferrara; Angie Martin, Sr. Manager of Operational Excellence, Salty Snack Division, The Hershey Company; Marion Kessler, VP of Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement, Sauder

Participate in a Redzone and ChampionAI demo along with a live customer panel, so you can envision a practical roadmap for applying AI within your own organization.

Coaching & Adoption: Scaling Multi-Plant Playbooks to Accelerate Results
Speakers: Zack Sosebee, SVP of Operations, Services, Redzone; Mark Sinnott, VP LE Coaching, Redzone; Angie Martin, Sr. Manager of Operational Excellence, Salty Snack Division, The Hershey Company; Alfred Carandang, VP, Continuous Improvement & Manufacturing Strategies, Ferrara; Zenas Chao, Operational Excellence Manager, Ferrara; AJ Heiner, VP of Manufacturing, The Campbell's Company

Learn how Redzone's coaching framework improves engagement, productivity, and workforce development across entire organizations. Getting the Proof of Concept executed flawlessly and then scaling at pace in parallel with your MOS/playbook.

How to Identify AI Opportunities That Deliver the Biggest Outcomes
Speaker: Anam Rahman, VP of GTM - ChampionAI

The manufacturers seeing the greatest returns from AI aren't experimenting broadly, they're choosing the right problems to solve. In this session, learn how to evaluate and prioritize AI opportunities across your business, and what it takes to structure projects so they deliver real, measurable outcomes.

Trade Volatility: How to Navigate Like a Champion
Speaker: Joshua Guy, VP of Global Trade Compliance

Two years of tariff volatility have made trade cost exposure a board-level issue, exposing which compliance programs can absorb the pressure and which can't. This session treats duty strategy as a financial lever, not just a compliance chore. We'll also look at where classification and origin decisions create the most risk, what audit records need for manufacturing operations, and how AI-assisted classification and screening scale without added headcount.

Platform & Connected Workforce Roadmaps: Adaptive ERP Backbone & Redzone Frontline
Speakers: Nancy Majure, Head of Product - Adaptive ERP; Blake Strickland, VP of Product Management, Redzone

Understand how Adaptive continues evolving into a modern manufacturing platform that improves operational control, interoperability, and execution. And then building on that, see the practical capabilities Redzone will have to augment and improve the effectiveness of frontline workers in the factory.

Future Roadmaps: Agentic Manufacturing with ChampionAI
Speaker: Sumit Sinha, Head of Applied AI

See where ChampionAI is headed and what it means for your operations. Explore the platform capabilities taking shape across agentic automation, role-based AI agents, and real-time decision support, and learn how QAD is building toward a manufacturing environment where AI works alongside your people, not around them.

Unwind after a full day of sessions with an evening at Wrigley Field as the Chicago Cubs take on the Miami Marlins. This is an opportunity to experience one of Chicago’s most iconic settings while continuing conversations beyond the conference floor.

From Proof to Action: Here’s How to Do It
Speaker: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO

This session turns possibility into practicality—showing manufacturers how to apply what they’ve seen throughout the event within their own operations starting now. Attendees will leave with a clear, actionable path forward, connecting real-world examples and proven outcomes to the next steps they can take to drive impact quickly.

The Frontline: Where Results Actually Change | AI, People, and Performance in Practice
Speaker: Ken Fisher, President, Redzone

Learn how better decision-making and execution on the frontline drive measurable gains in plant performance. Through a real-world implementation journey, attendees will see how frontline teams are using technology in practice to improve productivity, responsiveness and execution. Grounded entirely in real experience, this session connects frontline change directly to business results.

From First Use Case to Financial Results
Speakers: Patrick Min, CFO, Aphena Pharma Solutions; Kevin Davis, VP of Finance, AmSafe Aviation

See how AI translates into real financial outomes, not just insight. Patrick Min and Kevin Davis will show how prioritizing the “vital few” use cases and applying AI within execution—such as automating procurement workflows or reducing decision latency across planning and production—drives measurable impact. With expectations for results in as little as 8 to 12 weeks and examples of AI taking on a significant portion of transactional work, the session makes clear how to start small, prove value quickly, and scale with confidence.

The Cost of Waiting and the Opportunity to Move Now
Speaker: Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO

Close out the event with a session that showcases ways to achieve quick wins with AI, and build momentum over time without unnecessary risk or disruption. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of the impact on growth and performance and how to move forward with confidence.