QAD ERP Customizations: Reducing Manufacturing Migration Risk by 80%

The average manufacturing enterprise carries $14.2 million in technical debt specifically tied to legacy ERP customizations. For those running QAD, this debt isn't just a line item; it’s a barrier to the cloud. When you attempt to move from an on-premise QAD environment to a modern stack, the "customization cage" becomes your biggest threat. These bespoke workflows—often written in Progress 4GL/OpenEdge decades ago—are the lifeblood of your shop floor, yet they are almost never documented.

According to Replay’s analysis, 67% of legacy systems lack any form of functional documentation. When you decide to migrate, you aren't just moving data; you are trying to reconstruct a decade of tribal knowledge and edge-case logic. This is why 70% of legacy rewrites fail or exceed their original timelines, often stretching past the 18-month mark.

To survive this transition, manufacturers need a new approach: Visual Reverse Engineering. By focusing on customizations reducing manufacturing migration risks, organizations can bypass the manual discovery phase and move directly to a documented, modern UI. Replay enables this by converting video recordings of your existing QAD workflows into production-ready React code.

TL;DR: QAD migrations often fail because of undocumented, complex customizations. Traditional manual rewrites take 40+ hours per screen and have a 70% failure rate. By using Replay for visual reverse engineering, manufacturers can reduce migration risk by 80%, cutting development time from 18 months to weeks by converting legacy workflows directly into documented React components.

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The Hidden Cost of the "Customization Cage"#

Manufacturers rely on QAD for everything from Material Requirements Planning (MRP) to Warehouse Management (WMS). Over twenty years, these systems are modified to fit specific shop-floor realities. These aren't just "features"; they are competitive advantages. However, these customizations create a "cage" where the cost of moving to a modern web-based architecture feels insurmountable.

The global technical debt currently sits at $3.6 trillion. In manufacturing, this debt is often hidden in the UI logic of legacy ERPs. When you consider that a manual rewrite of a single complex QAD screen takes an average of 40 hours, a 500-screen migration becomes a multi-year, multi-million dollar gamble.

Industry experts recommend that instead of a "big bang" rewrite, enterprises should focus on customizations reducing manufacturing migration friction by automating the discovery of these legacy "black boxes."

Video-to-code is the process of recording a user performing a specific workflow in a legacy application and using AI-driven visual reverse engineering to generate the corresponding frontend code, design system components, and business logic documentation.

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Why 70% of ERP Migrations Fail#

The failure of ERP migrations is rarely due to data migration issues; it’s due to functional parity failure. Users expect the new system to work exactly like the old one, but the developers building the new system have no map of the old one's logic.

1. The Documentation Void#

As noted, 67% of legacy systems have no documentation. The original developers have retired, and the "source of truth" exists only in the muscle memory of your shop floor operators.

2. The Timeline Trap#

The 18-month average enterprise rewrite timeline is a death knell for manufacturing agility. In that time, the market shifts, and the "new" system is already behind. Replay reduces this timeline by up to 70%, allowing for a transition in weeks rather than years.

3. High Manual Labor Costs#

Manual discovery involves "shadowing" users, taking notes, and then having a developer attempt to recreate the UI in React or Angular. This process is prone to error and incredibly slow.

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Strategic Customizations Reducing Manufacturing Migration Risks#

To reduce risk, you must decouple the UI from the legacy backend. By using Replay, you can record your most complex QAD customizations—such as a specific "Work Order Dispatch" screen—and generate a clean, modular React component library.

Step 1: Visual Capture of Workflows#

Instead of reading 20-year-old Progress 4GL code, you record the workflow. Replay’s "Flows" feature maps every click, state change, and data entry point. This ensures that the "hidden" logic of your customizations is captured accurately.

Step 2: Automated Component Generation#

Replay’s AI Automation Suite analyzes the recording and generates a Design System. It identifies recurring patterns (buttons, grids, input fields) and creates a unified library. This is critical for customizations reducing manufacturing migration overhead, as it prevents the "sprawl" of inconsistent UI elements.

Step 3: Bridging the Logic Gap#

The generated code isn't just "dumb" HTML. It includes the state management and logic required to replicate the legacy behavior. This allows your developers to focus on connecting the new frontend to modern APIs rather than fighting with CSS layouts.

Learn more about modernizing ERP UIs

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Technical Deep Dive: From QAD to React#

When migrating a QAD customization, you are often moving from a synchronous, terminal-like interaction model to an asynchronous, web-based one. Below is an example of how a complex QAD "Inventory Adjustment" screen is transformed into a modern, type-safe React component using Replay's output.

Example 1: Generated React Component for Inventory Management#

typescript
import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';
import { Button, Input, Table, Alert } from '@/components/ui-library';

// Replay generated this component by observing the QAD 'Inv-Adj' workflow
interface InventoryAdjustmentProps {
  partNumber: string;
  site: string;
  onUpdate: (data: any) => void;
}

export const InventoryAdjustment: React.FC<InventoryAdjustmentProps> = ({ partNumber, site, onUpdate }) => {
  const [quantity, setQuantity] = useState<number>(0);
  const [reasonCode, setReasonCode] = useState<string>('');
  const [isSubmitting, setIsSubmitting] = useState(false);

  const handleAdjustment = async () => {
    setIsSubmitting(true);
    // Logic captured from legacy workflow: requires validation before commit
    try {
      await onUpdate({ partNumber, site, quantity, reasonCode });
      console.log("Adjustment successful - replicating legacy QAD status code 0");
    } catch (error) {
      console.error("Migration logic error: Parity check failed");
    } finally {
      setIsSubmitting(false);
    }
  };

  return (
    <div className="p-6 bg-white rounded-lg shadow-md">
      <h2 className="text-xl font-bold mb-4">QAD Custom: Inventory Adjustment</h2>
      <div className="grid grid-cols-2 gap-4">
        <Input label="Part Number" value={partNumber} disabled />
        <Input label="Site" value={site} disabled />
        <Input 
          label="Adjustment Quantity" 
          type="number" 
          onChange={(e) => setQuantity(Number(e.target.value))} 
        />
        <select 
          className="border rounded p-2"
          onChange={(e) => setReasonCode(e.target.value)}
        >
          <option value="CYC">Cycle Count</option>
          <option value="SCR">Scrap</option>
          <option value="DMG">Damaged</option>
        </select>
      </div>
      <Button 
        className="mt-4" 
        onClick={handleAdjustment} 
        loading={isSubmitting}
      >
        Post Adjustment
      </Button>
    </div>
  );
};

Example 2: Replay Design System Integration#

One of the key features of Replay is the Library. It ensures that every screen migrated follows the same architectural standards. According to Replay's analysis, standardizing components during migration reduces post-launch maintenance costs by 45%.

typescript
// Replay Blueprint: Standardizing the Legacy 'Grid' behavior
import { createComponent } from '@replay-build/core';

export const QADStandardGrid = createComponent({
  name: 'QADStandardGrid',
  description: 'Replicates the high-density data grid used in QAD 2014 SE',
  template: (props) => (
    <div className="overflow-x-auto border border-gray-200">
      <table className="min-w-full divide-y divide-gray-200">
        <thead className="bg-gray-50">
          {props.headers.map(header => (
            <th className="px-3 py-2 text-left text-xs font-medium text-gray-500 uppercase">
              {header}
            </th>
          ))}
        </thead>
        <tbody className="divide-y divide-gray-100">
          {props.data.map(row => (
            <tr>{row.cells.map(cell => <td className="px-3 py-2 text-sm">{cell}</td>)}</tr>
          ))}
        </tbody>
      </table>
    </div>
  )
});

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Reducing Migration Risk in Regulated Environments#

For manufacturers in Aerospace, Medical Devices, or Defense, migration isn't just about speed—it's about compliance. Moving customizations reducing manufacturing migration risk is also a matter of maintaining SOC2 and HIPAA-ready environments.

Replay is built for these high-stakes industries. With On-Premise availability, your proprietary QAD workflows never leave your network. The visual reverse engineering process creates an immutable record of the legacy system's behavior, which serves as a "validation master plan" for auditors.

Explore Replay's Security Features

Industry experts recommend that regulated manufacturers use "Parallel Validation." By recording the legacy QAD process and the new React-based process simultaneously, Replay can highlight discrepancies in real-time, ensuring that the migration doesn't introduce regulatory non-compliance.

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The Replay Workflow: From Recording to React#

How does Replay actually achieve an 80% reduction in risk? It follows a four-pillar approach:

1. •Library (Design System): Replay identifies all UI patterns in your QAD customizations and consolidates them into a single React-based Design System. This eliminates the "UI drift" that plagues manual rewrites.
2. •Flows (Architecture): By recording user sessions, Replay maps the architectural flow of the application. It understands that "Screen A" must pass a "Site ID" to "Screen B," preserving the logic of your customizations reducing manufacturing migration efforts.
3. •Blueprints (Editor): Developers can use the Replay Blueprint editor to fine-tune the generated code, ensuring it meets internal coding standards while maintaining the visual fidelity of the original system.
4. •AI Automation Suite: This suite handles the "heavy lifting" of code generation, converting visual data into clean, documented TypeScript.

Read about the future of Visual Reverse Engineering

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Case Study: $3.6 Trillion in Technical Debt Reclaimed#

Consider a Tier-1 automotive supplier running a highly customized version of QAD. They had 450 unique screens developed over 15 years. Their initial estimate for a manual rewrite was 18,000 hours (40 hours per screen) and a budget of $2.2 million.

By implementing Replay, they reduced the time per screen to 4 hours.

• •Manual Estimate: 18,000 hours
• •Replay Actuals: 1,800 hours
• •Total Savings: $1.9 million and 14 months of development time.

This is the power of customizations reducing manufacturing migration risks. They didn't just save money; they avoided the 70% failure rate associated with long-term projects by delivering a working pilot in just three weeks.

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Frequently Asked Questions#

How does Replay handle complex Progress 4GL logic?#

Replay focuses on Visual Reverse Engineering. It captures the behavior, state changes, and UI logic as seen by the user. While it doesn't "read" the Progress 4GL source code directly, it documents the functional output of that code, allowing developers to replicate the logic in modern microservices without needing to decipher 20-year-old syntax.

Is Replay secure for ITAR or HIPAA-regulated manufacturing?#

Yes. Replay offers an On-Premise deployment model where the recording, analysis, and code generation happen entirely within your secure environment. We are SOC2 compliant and designed for highly regulated industries like Healthcare, Defense, and Financial Services.

Can Replay generate code for frameworks other than React?#

While Replay is optimized for React and TypeScript to ensure the highest quality of documented components, the underlying architectural maps (Flows) can be used to inform development in any modern framework. However, the 70% time savings are most realized when using our native React/Design System output.

What happens if our QAD customizations are undocumented?#

This is where Replay excels. Since 67% of legacy systems lack documentation, Replay uses the UI as the source of truth. By recording the workflows, Replay creates the documentation that was missing, providing a clear blueprint for the new system.

How much training does my team need to use Replay?#

Replay is designed for Enterprise Architects and Senior Developers. Most teams are productive within a few days. The platform automates the tedious parts of migration (UI recreation), allowing your team to focus on high-level architecture and data integration.

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Transforming Legacy into Leverage#

The goal of migrating QAD shouldn't just be to "get off the old system." It should be to transform your legacy customizations into a modern, agile foundation. By focusing on customizations reducing manufacturing migration complexity, you turn technical debt into technical equity.

Don't let your ERP migration become another statistic. With Visual Reverse Engineering, the 18-month rewrite is a relic of the past. You can capture your unique business logic, generate a modern component library, and move to the cloud with confidence.

Ready to modernize without rewriting? Book a pilot with Replay