A software company in the beach town of Carpinteria, California ran the factory floors of Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson and Philips. QAD sold MFG/PRO, an enterprise system that tied together manufacturing, distribution and finance. By April 1997 it had licensed the software at about 3,200 sites for 1,880 customers in over 70 countries. When it went public that August, enterprise software was booming as companies rushed to replace old systems before the year 2000.

A Founder and Her Husband

Pamela Lopker founded QAD in 1979 and served as its president. Her husband, Karl Lopker, joined in 1981 and became chief executive; he had earlier founded Deckers Outdoor. The company incorporated as qad.inc in 1986 and became QAD Inc. in February 1997. The bet was focus. QAD built only for manufacturers, from Cargill and Unilever to St. Jude Medical, and sold the same software around the world.

Fifteen Dollars, Then Thoma Bravo

QAD sold 5.75 million shares at $15 each in August 1997 and listed on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol QADI. After the offering, its directors and officers still owned about 71 percent of the company. QAD stayed public for 24 years and moved its software to the cloud. In November 2021 Thoma Bravo took it private for $87.50 a share, a deal worth about $2 billion.

Cover: Landscape with Smokestacks, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for factory smokestacks (manufacturing).