CHICAGO & MIAMI -- September 22, 2026 -- Champions of Manufacturing — QAD | Redzone, the company behind the world’s number one platform for manufacturers, unveiled its vision for Manufacturing Intelligence, a new intelligence layer designed to work across manufacturing processes, workflows and systems, helping manufacturers continuously move from seeing what is happening to understanding what it means, deciding what should happen next, taking action and proving the outcome.
Announced at Champions of Manufacturing 2026 in Chicago, Manufacturing Intelligence represents the next horizon in QAD | Redzone's strategy to help manufacturers move beyond systems that primarily record and manage information toward systems that increasingly understand, decide and create action.
The vision builds on the QAD | Redzone Manufacturing Platform available to manufacturers today, bringing together Adaptive ERP, Redzone Connected Workforce, Supply Chain and ChampionAI to connect the systems, people, processes and decisions that drive manufacturing performance from the shop floor to the top floor.
Unlike intelligence confined to an individual application, Manufacturing Intelligence will operate across the broader manufacturing environment. Over time, it will bring QAD | Redzone's manufacturing domain expertise together with manufacturing data, workflows and AI to help manufacturers identify changes sooner, understand their implications, determine the appropriate response and increasingly execute that response within the systems where work gets done. It is also designed to extend beyond the QAD | Redzone technology stack, allowing manufacturers to apply manufacturing-specific intelligence across heterogeneous environments without first replacing the systems they already have.
“Manufacturers don't need more AI for the sake of AI. They need better outcomes,” said Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO of QAD | Redzone. “They are trying to protect margin, respond faster to disruption, improve execution and help their people perform at their best. Manufacturing Intelligence is our vision for bringing intelligence across the systems, workflows and decisions that determine those outcomes. And manufacturers don't have to wait for that future to begin. The innovations we're announcing today give them practical ways to create value now, wherever they are in their transformation. Manufacturing Intelligence will take that further, creating a manufacturing environment that can continuously understand what is happening, determine what should happen next and turn those decisions into action, helping manufacturers become faster, more resilient and more competitive—Champions in their field.”
The announcement comes as manufacturers face growing pressure from labor constraints, margin pressure, supply chain volatility and increasing operational complexity while simultaneously being asked by boards and leadership teams to demonstrate how AI will create measurable business value. QAD | Redzone's approach begins with the manufacturing problem, based on deep expertise and years of manufacturing experience and data, rather than the technology: identify a meaningful workflow, understand the friction and economic impact, apply intelligence where it can improve the outcome, prove the value and expand from there. While Manufacturing Intelligence will officially launch in Spring 2027, attendees at Champions of Manufacturing are seeing it today through real-time demos, workshops and an environment they can test drive.
To learn more about Manufacturing Intelligence, read the full announcement.
In a related announcement, QAD | Redzone unveiled that it plans to integrate technology from NVIDIA, combining NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AI with QAD | Redzone’s manufacturing expertise and operational context spanning ERP, connected workforce, supply chain, production and quality. This combination of technology and manufacturing expertise will help shape a federated intelligence layer that can understand manufacturing context across systems without requiring manufacturers to replace the technology they already run, connecting intelligence wherever it lives.
QAD said no other provider can bring the same combination of depth and reach to that mission: Manufacturing Intelligence is built on QAD | Redzone’s foundation of deep manufacturing domain expertise, real operating data from more than 6,000 plants worldwide, and decades of experience inside the world’s most regulated, most unforgiving manufacturing environments — automotive, life sciences, food and beverage, industrial and high tech.
QAD | Redzone wants to connect those islands of intelligence.
QAD | Redzone plans to integrate NVIDIA AI and accelerated computing into its manufacturing intelligence platform to build a federated intelligence layer, powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI, that can understand manufacturing context across systems without requiring manufacturers to replace the technology they already run. That distinction matters. The future of manufacturing will not be created by moving every piece of data into another system.
It will be created by connecting intelligence wherever it lives.
Initial capabilities will leverage NVIDIA's NVDinoV2 vision foundation model for quality inspection, with a downstream reasoning layer to explain what is detected — and what it means for the production order, quality record and workflow it touches. Vision AI agents can continuously observe production environments and identify potential quality, safety and process exceptions as they happen. But seeing something is only the beginning. QAD | Redzone can connect those observations to manufacturing context — the production order, product, lot, supplier, asset, quality record, operator and workflow associated with what the AI sees. A camera detecting an anomaly is an alert.
Knowing what that anomaly means to production — and what should happen next — is Manufacturing Intelligence.
“Manufacturers are surrounded by intelligence, but today most of it is trapped — trapped in machines, ERP systems, supplier documents, production data and the experience of people on the factory floor,” added Brahmawar. “Our ambition is to use NVIDIA technologies to help federate that intelligence and put it to work. Imagine a manufacturing enterprise where the factory can see, the ERP can understand, the supply chain can anticipate, the operation can continuously optimize — and every person can make better decisions in real time. That is Manufacturing Intelligence. And we believe it will fundamentally change how manufacturers compete. We don’t want our customers spending the next three years building an AI strategy. We want them measuring the value in the first 90 days.”
NVIDIA brings a unique combination of accelerated computing, AI models, inference technologies, visual AI, optimization capabilities and edge computing infrastructure. QAD | Redzone brings decades of manufacturing expertise and operational context spanning ERP, connected workforce, production, quality, supply chain and thousands of manufacturing plants. The combination is critical. AI without manufacturing context can recognize patterns.
AI with manufacturing context can understand what those patterns mean.
That is the foundation the companies intend to build upon.
“Manufacturers are moving rapidly from experimenting with AI to embedding intelligence across their operations,” said Tarik Hammadou, Director of Developer Relations at NVIDIA. “By combining QAD | Redzone’s deep manufacturing context and footprint across thousands of plants with NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI, they can help manufacturers connect intelligence across the enterprise and translate it into faster decisions, greater productivity and measurable operational outcomes.”
QAD | Redzone also announced a significant portfolio of innovations to their Adaptive ERP, the Redzone Connected Workforce and Supply Chain Global Trade Compliance at Champions of Manufacturing that demonstrate how the company is bringing intelligence into real manufacturing workflows across ERP, the frontline and supply chain today.
Bringing Intelligence and Action into Adaptive ERP
QAD is expanding AI across Adaptive ERP with Champion Assist and new persona-based Champions spanning Procurement, Sales, Sourcing and Accounts Payable.
“Manufacturers shouldn’t have to choose between modernizing their ERP and creating value today. Adaptive gives them the intelligent backbone they need for what comes next, while Champion Assist and our expanding portfolio of Champions allow them to start solving real business problems now. Our goal is simple: meet customers where they are and give them the fastest, most practical path to measurable value,” said Amit Sharma, President of Manufacturing ERP.
Champion Assist brings intelligence directly into everyday ERP work, allowing users to interact naturally with live ERP information, understand what is happening and act without navigating traditional screens and processes. Persona-based Champions go further, applying agentic AI to workflows by monitoring activity, processing information, updating systems and escalating decisions that require human judgment.
The approach allows manufacturers to begin applying AI to meaningful business problems without waiting for a complete ERP transformation. Manufacturers that modernize with Adaptive gain an intelligent backbone designed to reduce complexity and technical debt and make it easier to continuously adopt new capabilities as their business evolves.
To learn more about Champion Assist and the new Accounts Payable Champion, read the full announcement.
Reinventing ERP Modernization with Lynx Champion
QAD | Redzone also introduced Lynx Champion, an agentic AI application designed to fundamentally change one of the biggest barriers to successful ERP modernization projects: understanding years or even decades of customizations and the business logic behind them; deciding what needs to stay and be modernized and what doesn’t.
Lynx Champion analyzes legacy customizations to help determine why they exist, where standard functionality can replace them, what represents technical debt and what genuine business differentiation should be rebuilt as modern, upgrade-safe extensions.
By applying agentic AI to work that has historically required extensive manual analysis, Lynx Champion has the potential to dramatically compress the timeline and change the economics of ERP modernization. Rather than simply adding AI to ERP, QAD | Redzone is applying AI to reinvent the transformation process itself.
Current customers where the Lynx Champion has been used to go from legacy QAD ERP to Adaptive have experienced migrations in months where in the past, it would’ve taken years.
To learn more about Lynx Champion, read the full announcement.
Expanding the Ecosystem for Manufacturing Intelligence with NVIDIA
QAD | Redzone also announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA as a centerpiece of the technology ecosystem supporting its Manufacturing Intelligence vision.
The collaboration brings together NVIDIA's accelerated computing and AI technology with QAD | Redzone's manufacturing expertise, context, data and workflows, expanding the potential to apply Manufacturing Intelligence across areas including visual intelligence, multimodal information, natural-language interaction and continuous production optimization.
QAD | Redzone sees Manufacturing Intelligence as an ecosystem strategy. Technology, cloud and delivery partners will play an important role in connecting intelligence across the heterogeneous environments manufacturers already operate and helping customers deploy and scale new capabilities faster.
To learn more about the planned integration with NVIDIA technologies, read the full announcement.
Bringing Agentic AI Directly to the Manufacturing Frontline
Redzone is expanding its portfolio of purpose-built Champions for frontline manufacturing roles, putting intelligence directly into the flow of work for the people responsible for manufacturing execution. New Line Lead, Operations Manager, Inspector, Kaizen, Yield, Recognition and Skills Champions help frontline teams make better decisions in real time, automate routine work, identify and prevent quality issues, accelerate continuous improvement and deliver more targeted coaching and training.
Built on the context of more than 2.2 billion line-run hours, 5 billion frontline collaborations and 800,000 hours of operational excellence coaching experience, the Champions build on Redzone’s Connected Workforce to help employees access knowledge, identify patterns, solve problems faster and continuously improve how work gets done.
Amplifying the human potential, the goal is making connected frontline teams increasingly capable rather than removing people from the process. Better decisions and faster execution on the factory floor ultimately translate into the outcomes manufacturing leaders measure, including productivity, throughput, quality, cost and margin.
“The frontline is where manufacturing performance is won or lost, and that’s where AI has the potential to make an enormous difference. These Champions put intelligence directly into the hands of the people doing the work, helping them make better decisions, solve problems faster and continuously improve. We’re taking everything we’ve learned from thousands of factories and billions of hours of frontline activity and using it to make every person on the frontline more capable—and happier,” said Ken Fisher, President of Redzone.
To learn more about the newest members of the frontline Champion roster, read the full announcement.
Connecting the Shop Floor to the Top Floor
QAD | Redzone also announced expanded integration between Redzone frontline execution and the broader enterprise and manufacturing technology environment, further connecting Redzone with ERP and other critical systems.
“Manufacturers don’t operate in silos, and their technology shouldn’t either. This is much bigger than connecting two products. We’re connecting the frontline with the systems that run the rest of the manufacturing business, creating a continuous flow of information and action from the shop floor to the top floor. That is fundamental to our ambition to be the number one platform for manufacturing and to give manufacturers one connected environment for improving how their entire business performs,” continued Brahmawar.
The integration brings to life one of the central ideas behind the QAD | Redzone Manufacturing Platform: manufacturing execution and enterprise systems cannot operate as separate worlds.
Adaptive ERP provides the operational backbone. Redzone connects and empowers the people responsible for execution. ChampionAI increasingly brings intelligence into the workflows connecting the two. Together, they create a more continuous connection between what the business plans and what actually happens on the factory floor.
To learn more about the improved integration between Redzone Connected Workforce and QAD Adaptive ERP, read the full announcement.
Moving Global Trade from Reactive Compliance to Proactive Intelligence
QAD also announced the Global Trade Compliance Champion, bringing agentic AI to one of the most complex and rapidly changing areas facing global manufacturers.
Tariffs, classifications, regulations, screening requirements and documentation are changing at a speed and volume that increasingly challenge manual processes. Global Trade Compliance Champion is designed to combine AI scale with human expertise and accountability, helping manufacturers monitor change, process large volumes of information, identify what requires attention and respond faster while maintaining the governance required in regulated environments.
“Manufacturers can’t control the pace of change in global trade, but they can control how quickly they understand and respond to it. AI gives us the ability to process a level of complexity and change that people simply cannot manage manually, while keeping human expertise where it belongs: in judgment, governance and accountability. The opportunity is to move global trade from reactive compliance to proactive intelligence that helps manufacturers protect revenue, margin and customer relationships,” said Roy Arguelles, President of Supply Chain Solutions.
The broader vision is to move global trade from reactive compliance toward proactive trade intelligence. Instead of discovering the impact of a tariff, classification or regulatory change after it has affected the business, manufacturers can increasingly see change sooner, understand where they are exposed, determine the potential impact on revenue, margin, cost and customers, and decide what action to take.
To learn more about the new Trade Compliance Champion, read the full announcement.
More Than AI: Manufacturing Expertise Applied to Manufacturing Problems
Underlying the announcements is a distinction QAD | Redzone believes will become increasingly important as AI proliferates across enterprise technology: manufacturing context matters.
“AI value doesn’t arrive alongside ERP; it arrives through it because the business context is already there, something the QAD team intuitively understands,” said Robert Kramer, founder and managing partner of KramerERP, a boutique advisory firm specializing in AI, ERP, SCM, data, and security, with an emphasis on real-world results. “These kinds of AI-powered innovations, now further enhanced by a strong vision for manufacturing intelligence, are the whole idea behind moving from ERP systems of record to systems of action. When combined with shop floor systems, we can see how technology enables transformation, while empowered people determine outcomes.”
For more than 50 years, QAD | Redzone has built technology around the processes manufacturers depend on to run their businesses. That experience provides a foundation of manufacturing domain expertise, data, processes and workflows that can be combined with AI to address problems specific to manufacturing rather than simply applying generic AI capabilities to them. The company's messaging has consistently centered on moving from static information toward intelligent execution and measurable business outcomes.
That approach also changes how manufacturers can begin.
A manufacturer may modernize its operational backbone with Adaptive ERP. Another may transform frontline execution with Redzone. Another may deploy ChampionAI against a high-value workflow in its existing environment. Another may begin with sourcing, procurement or global trade. And another may operate an entirely different ERP.
There is no single required transformation sequence.
The QAD | Redzone Manufacturing Platform gives customers multiple ways to create measurable value today. Manufacturing Intelligence establishes the larger vision for how that intelligence can ultimately extend across more of the manufacturing environment, regardless of where a manufacturer begins.
“Manufacturers have spent decades investing in systems that help them understand what happened,” said Brahmawar. “The opportunity now is to help them move faster from what they know to what they do. That is the shift we are building toward: intelligence grounded in manufacturing expertise, connected to the workflows where decisions are made and increasingly capable of turning those decisions into action.”
About QAD | Redzone
QAD | Redzone is redefining manufacturing and supply chains through its intelligent, adaptive platform that connects people, processes, and technology into a single System of Action. With three core pillars — Redzone (frontline empowerment), Adaptive Applications (the intelligent backbone), and ChampionAI (agentic AI for manufacturing) — QAD | Redzone helps manufacturers operate with Champion Pace, achieving measurable productivity, resilience, and growth in as little as 90 days. To learn more, visit www.qad.com or call +1805-566-6100. Find us on LinkedIn, X, Facebook and Instagram.