ERP choices grow wider in alliance

tSGi, eXegeSys join to manufacture new solutions

Almost two years to the day after HP said it will stop selling and supporting HP 3000s, the platform’s biggest segment of users is still learning about options to move their applications.

But even before the biggest application provider discussed migration options this month, a pair of software companies announced they will partner to offer these manufacturing customers an alternative that eases the migration of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) installations onto commodity hardware.

eXegeSys, which overhauled HP’s legacy MRP apps for the 3000 during the 1990s, will partner with the Support Group inc. (tSGi), which supports MANMAN sites with a help desk and surround code. The companies’ alliance represents a match between the two biggest bases of ERP apps. The scope of the deal is bigger than the combined numbers of the 3000’s healthcare, e-commerce or credit union markets: eXegeSys, with its eXegeSys Resource Planning Suite (eRP), and tSGi’s MANMAN customers reach into a market of well over 1,000 installations. These two companies want HP 3000 sites using MANMAN to bring eRP online, using interfaces and enhancements tSGi provides to make eRP look and feel like MANMAN.

“We thought it would be good to give them something that is similar to MANMAN,” said tSGi’s Sue Kiezel. “We’ll use the same terms, and transaction processing that is similar — so the move to this eRP system doesn’t have to be very painful to users.”

tSGi will make use of the Customizer technology inside eRP, according to tSGi’s founder Terry Floyd. Initial conversion of these MANMAN sites can be to eRP running on an HP 3000, so IT staff will continue to deal with IMAGE as a database. Exegesys’ eRP will also run on Linux, HP-UX, and Windows NT “in early 2004,” according to an eXegeSys announcement, which said that preliminary customer implementations of the new suite will begin this quarter.

“We are extremely pleased with our results in translating, porting, and migrating the existing eRP suite to open systems,” said Steve Quinn, eXegeSys vice-president and co-founder. “It has been a huge undertaking, yet the migration technology we have is working according to plan and we are on track to have the suite released early next year.”

Floyd said the goal of the alliance remains in line with his company’s mission: better choice.

“Our message is to give the MANMAN users a choice,” Floyd said. Other divisions of tSGi sell non-3000 manufacturing solutions such as IFS, Softbrands, and Fourth Shift. The alliance brings together two organizations whose founders and developers have decades of background in MPE and the HP 3000.

“We are pleased with the intensity with which Paul Dorius and Steve Quinn of eXegeSys have applied resources to addressing the key issues concerning migration paths from MANMAN,” Floyd said. “For our part, we have the depth to do this integration. We can use Customizer to make eRP look very much like MANMAN. We are adding fields to eRP which have been unique to MANMAN.”

As a consultancy that’s been serving MANMAN shops for 10 years, tSGi sees the eRP Customizer technology as a good way to preserve customers’ processes. “People have these customized processes for a reason,” Floyd said.

ERP complexities

The life of the MANMAN site is not a simple one today. The application is now owned by SSA Global Technologies (SSA-GT), which acquired the app as well as a handful of others over the last 18 months. MANMAN isn’t scheduled for any more enhancements, but SSA-GT will support the application “until the nuts and bolts fall out of your HP 3000s,” at last report.

But on Nov. 13 SSA-GT was scheduled to take questions from the MANMAN base on a nationwide conference call. The hook-up, organized by manufacturing user group CAMUS, is expected to reveal more information about SSA-GT’s latest offer to swap MANMAN sites license for license for SSA-GT’s newest ERP application acquisition, Baan.

While some customers using MANMAN on the 3000 have been shifting away, this transition represents too much risk for other sites — at least for now. Carol Hoinski, the IT Director for Teleflex Marine, said the only change she knows she’ll make to her MANMAN installation is to add processors to her HP 3000.

“I’m still sitting on the fence,” Hoinski said. “I just put in a purchase order to get two new processors for our HP 3000. My processors are getting chewed up with orders from five or six different companies. You don’t know what to do. I still don’t feel that [SSA-GT] is helping yet.”

Although she had not heard of the eRP alternative, the IT manager’s goals would seem to align with the tSGi options. “I want to go with something that SSA-GT will continue to work on, something that is probably on another hardware platform,” she said. A non-3000 server seems likely at Teleflex, where Hoinski is leaning toward IBM’s iSeries, because that platform supports her Cognos code.

Minimizing change

eRP’s Customizer technology might appeal to the MANMAN shops that want an application with enhancements in its future, but don’t want to have to integrate source code changes. The eRP flexibility is an advantage, according to tSGi, which becomes an eXegeSys reseller as part of the alliance.

“There is no source code required to change eRP,” Floyd said. “But they have user exits in the application everywhere, so you can change code, change the database or temp files, put it right back where you were and it will continue processing.”

MANMAN customers can also do a phased conversion using tSGi code, so a company can continue to run its financials with MANMAN while it uses eRP for processes like order entry. Because tSGi is a consultancy, it can help a customer “narrow down from the 400 or so packages to five they’d like,” Floyd said. The company will use its EdiX/3000 extraction tool to move data off the 3000 and into the eRP databases on other platforms.

Officials at eXegeSys are advising their eRP clients to plan for migrations, but Floyd said he believes the eRP package “will be supported on the HP 3000 by eXegeSys for quite awhile.” But eXegeSys isn’t investing in enhancements for the HP 3000 version of its software, the same strategy SSA-GT is following for the HP 3000 version of MANMAN. eRP’s enhancements lie along the path of Linux, HP-UX or Windows NT.

To accommodate the broad range of manufacturing customers, tSGi will also continue to help customers use MANMAN for years beyond HP’s support.

“One of these choices is to stay on MANMAN another 10 years,” Floyd said. “The Support Group is famous for being independent, so we’ve got all these options. When working with a MANMAN customer, we just narrow down the choices.”

Even while acknowledging that it can help sites stay with the 3000 and MANMAN, tSGi knows that the eXegeSys solution will meet the requirements of migration-bound sites. “It is multi-platform, and it does run on different databases,” Floyd said of eRP. “And if they want to consider price, eRP will be less expensive than Oracle, or Baan.”