Cincinnati, Ohio-based Cincom Systems is the latest company to ride the mid-range trend in enterprise resource planning software, with the launch of its Manage: Enterprise package. The company’s marketing director, Roger Meloy claims that the customizable nature of the software will help it to win out against rivals in the ERP field. According to Meloy, the main innovation of the seventh version of the package is an update function that enables users to carry through changes when upgrading systems. It also enables customers to keep customizations they have made to Manage: Enterprise 7 system in a separate folder which can be integrated with future Manage: Enterprise system updates. Meloy also claims that the software’s integrated planning and scheduling engine won’t face the kind of interfacing problems of rival packages. He also pushed the software’s suitability for smaller companies, claiming that software such as SAP R/3 is built around large offices, which means that small and mid-range users may have to work their way through superfluous screens before reaching the relevant module. The Manage: Enterprise package has 8 user screens. In addition, Meloy says that the latest version of the software is Year 2000 and European Monetary Union currency (EMU) compliant. Manage: Enterprise 7 is being pushed at companies in the $10m to $80m revenue range. Meloy claims that a typical 10 user system would take 3 months to implement and cost around $166,300. It runs on Unix, NT and is available for Microsoft’s SQL and Oracle databases.
