MANMAN to journey to cloud-based ERP
May 25, 2016
The first project to move a MANMAN HP 3000 site to Kenandy's cloud-based ERP has an official start date. Terry Floyd and his team at The Support Group have a one-year mission to move Disston Tools from MANMAN to the Kenandy software, starting at the beginning of July. A manufacturer whose roots go back to 1840, Disston is dependent on EDI, an aspect that will help to prove that Kenandy is a good fit for MANMAN migrators.
"It’s an incredible ERP system – a completely new design concept and paradigm for ERP," Floyd said of Kenandy. "There are no modules; it’s all one thing. It has amazing functionality… and it's ready for MANMAN companies now, as I predicted four years ago."
Like many MANMAN sites on the HP 3000, Disston has a complicated company structure and MANMAN has been modified. Floyd has an insider advantage in leading the journey away from MPE/iX, "since I first started working on their FORTAN in 1986." He adds that they have given themselves a year "to get everything right and do one big cutover." He's been a guru for MANMAN sites through the software's many owners, from the earliest days when he worked for ASK Computer, then on his own and into MANMAN's Computer Associates days, forward to the SSA Global era, and finally to Infor's current stewardship of MANMAN. Kenandy feels like old blood, in a good way, he said.
"All of us [at the Support Group] spent a week at Kenandy Partner Training sessions. We met everybody and what a group they are. It’s just like ASK in 1980." By that Floyd means the creators of MANMAN, ASK. The company's founder Sandy Kurtzig was crucial to getting Kenandy's software ready for the marketplace. Floyd has been talking about the solution since 2011, pegging it as a good destination for MANMAN sites who want to leave the HP 3000.
Floyd said almost five years ago that re-thinking is the key to making a new generation of manufacturing software.
I think Sandra Kurtzig has done it again with the new Kenandy “no-ERP” manufacturing applications. Kenandy was developed over the last year and a half using the Salesforce toolsets which really gave them a good head start. It will be very recognizable to any MANMAN/MFG user, having an Item Master, BOMs, Routings, WO’s, PO’s, demand management and MRP. Apparently Sandy wrote some of the code herself, just like the early days of MANMAN.
One of the roadblocks to putting classic ERP into a Salesforce cloud model are those customizations. HP 3000 sites were so locked in to customization as a strategy that the competing MM II app from HP included a Customizer tool. "A lot of people are rethinking all the crazy customizations they've done," Kenandy's president Rod Butters said. "This is where Sandra's experience makes a huge difference for us. If we didn't have her insights, this product wouldn't be the same."