CAMUS meets show MANMAN strategies

Manufacturing sites look at ERP futures, potential

By Terry Floyd

Shaggy Carey of the Support Group, inc. welcomed a larger-than-expected crowd to this spring’s CAMUS RUG Meeting in Tulsa, noting that it had been many years since there had been a users group meeting for MANMAN users in Oklahoma.

There were about 17 people in the room when the meeting started, but several others joined during the morning. Shaggy was gratified to see a 4-to-1 ratio of users to vendors, the opposite of the turnout at the three prior South Central RUG Meetings, held in Texas during 2003. Everyone in the room introduced themselves and talked about what they did with MANMAN. Both platforms, MPE and VMS, were represented, but no MK users attended.

9:30AM: I introduced the morning’s speaker, long-time MANMAN/hp applications manager Ken Beebe of Kennametal in Rogers, Ark. Ken spoke for an hour and a half on his experiences using MANMAN/MPE and how his company has extended the standard software with their own and some bolt-on additions. Two divisions of Kennametal are using 6.2 and 8.2 Releases as foundations for their ERP efforts. These 10-15 year-old versions of MANMAN have been transformed significantly by programmers and consultants at Kennametal, formerly a division of Harbor Group called Greenfield Industries.

Ken has been overseeing the use of MANMAN as an applications manager in the IT department at the manufacturing site in Rogers for over 18 years. He provided extensive handouts and slides with examples of the main changes to MANMAN at the sites for which he has responsibility.

Ken pointed out that differentiation is difficult, especially in some of the commodity-product businesses that Kennametal has acquired as it grew to over $2 billion in annual sales. In their Metal Working and Materials Solutions Groups, they have always been very sensitive to serving their customers’ whims. This means customization of products (especially packaging) and processes to meet their clients’ demands.

Responsiveness to customer requests for particular processing methods caused many of the changes that have been done to MANMAN by Ken’s teams over the years. Other changes have been brought about by the need to interface to other systems.

Five of Kennametal’s seven major divisions use MANMAN on HP 3000s operated from two large data centers in two separate Southern states. The other two divisions have gone to SAP. All the rest will go from MANMAN to SAP someday, but not any time soon. MANMAN is still growing in use at Kennametal, where they have been “off support” and free to do whatever they wanted to do to MANMAN for over 10 years.

Kennametal’s other divisions had gone to SAP to consolidate their disparate home-grown software. When they bought these divisions running MANMAN, Kennametal executives discovered that there was already a flexible, integrated, customizable system in place. They also noticed that there are 10 people supporting MANMAN instead of the 40 IT staff members supporting SAP in the other divisions.

Ken is currently talking about getting off of MANMAN in the 2006 to 2008 timeframe.

11AM: Lunch and preparation for discussion during CAMUS Conference Call. Not very many questions needed urgent answers for this group of seasoned MANMAN veterans. Some of the attendees were new to MANMAN (only a few years of experience), but the companies they work for have been using MANMAN a long time.

Noon: CAMUS Conference Call. Seven RUGS hooked up on a conference call moderated by the CAMUS staff and Board of Directors. There were not many questions about the role of CAMUS. Everyone seems to be in agreement that the annual meeting and the RUG Meetings provide value because users need to talk to other users and to all third-party vendors, advisers, and consultants to hear as many competing opinions as possible.

1:25PM: Sue Peyton of SSA spoke on SSA’s Product Directions and answered questions. (See the CAMUS newsletters and Web sites for more details, as well as the December, 2003 NewsWire). SSA is still talking with HP about emulator and migration options, so MANMAN/MPE may not be dead yet.

2PM: Birket Foster of MB Foster Associates (1-800-ANSWERS, lest someone forget) temporarily put on his “Chairman of OpenMPE” hat for about 10 minutes and gave a very open and honest opinion of the state of HP 3000 migration in early ‘04. Everyone agrees there’s no hurry to get rid of your MPE machines unless you are a really huge company needing six years or more to convert.

Plans for how you are going to stay on MPE are essential at this point, according to Foster, but are easy compared to plans for migration. OpenMPE is doing what it can to represent companies who want to stay on HP 3000 hardware, including plans for custodial functions after Hewlett Packard exits the market in 2007. Birket used the year 2010 as a date when concern may begin to grow, but there are a lot of things that could happen to extend that date.

It turned into a wide-ranging discussion of topics relevant to all MANMAN users. Birket fielded several questions from the crowd about migration products in general and his own MBF-UDACentral product in particular. It was a helpful discussion, relevant even to MANMAN/VMS users because of the feeling that they’ll be going through the same things in five or 10 years, depending on Carly Fiorina’s successes and failures.

Special thanks from Shaggy to John Stevens of eXegeSys who donated several door prizes and challenges other third-parties to help Shaggy out at the next meeting.

The meeting adjourned about 3PM. As usual, almost everyone learned something valuable to take back to their job from an unexpected person in an unexpected way at an unexpected time. Is it serendipity or do good things happen at these meetings because users have so much in common? The only way to find out is to attend the meeting yourself next time. Supporting CAMUS is more important now than ever before.

Terry Floyd is founder of the Support Group, inc., a third party support and ERP solutions company, as well as a past chair of SIG-MANMAN.