A Brief History of MANMAN, ASK, and Manufacturing Knowledge

Click here for Mitchell Humphrey sponsor message

A Brief History of MANMAN, ASK, and Manufacturing Knowledge

Over the years MANMAN has experienced highs and lows. At once time ASK was a media darling – a successful high-tech company founded and run by a woman. The MANMAN product itself has a good reputation in the mid-sized manufacturing systems market. The company, however, unsuccessfully tried to follow up its success with a “next generation” solution based on a new technology infrastructure. When I was with ASK in the late 1980s on several occasions I heard the president and co founder of ASK say that “we are an applications company, not a software tool company.” Unfortunately, the companies now on top of the ERP market all developed their own technology infrastructure. The search for a new technology infrastructure led ASK to purchase Ingres for its relational DBMS and tools.

ASK finally purchased a infrastructure and the basic application software for a ERP system from a then little-known Dutch company named Baan. (Today Baan is one of the “big four” ERP vendors). As part of the sales agreement ASK modified significant amounts of the functionality and called the application MANMAN/X. Strained by development costs and weak sales, the company floundered. By 1994 ASK was facing a severe cash crisis. Looking for a financial angel or a buyer, the board of directors finally recommended a buyout offer from Computer Associates. Many ASK employees, however, responded as to a hostile takeover and resigned. Ironically, news of Computer Associates offer to buy Computer Sciences Corporation broke during the CAMUS conference. Industry analysts’ concerns about CA’s “ferocious reputation” and the loss of experienced staff mirror the ASK takeover. Many MANMAN customers expressed skepticism about CA’s ability to maintain the product, and the quality of support noticeably dropped. The rate of management turnover became a common subject of black humor.

By 1996 CA concluded that application software and services shouldn’t be managed like software tools and utilities. CA spun off its manufacturing products into an independent business unit to be named the MK Group (MK for Manufacturing Knowledge). MANMAN/X was renamed MK to reflect its marketing role as the flagship product. Independence seems to be working. In the MK Group’s keynote address to the conference, MK’s general manager Kurt Seibert pointed out that this is his third consecutive CAMUS event – and asserted that the MK Group has begun to prove stable and is responding better to customer needs.

– Cortlandt Wilson