Ask Computer Systems Inc has just announced Release 8.0 of its ManMan manufacturing information management system, fuelling rumours that its next generation product, Advance, is still in development difficulty as slipping launch dates have suggested (CI No 1,578). Paul Eggleton, UK marketing manager, denies this, arguing that Release 8.0 is an upgrade of the existing ManMan range, which will continue to be developed, and has its own development life cycle, until the end of the century. Advance, being a next generation product, will have to win its own user base, though some ManMan users are expected to upgrade and migrate their applications, or have the two systems co-existing. Despite the existence of an upgrade path from ManMan to Advance, the uptake is not guaranteed because while ManMan is a point system for manufacturing plants – an MRP package, Advance will offer manufacturing functionality integrated with financial, logistics and distribution packages for enterprise-wide systems. Consequently, those that just require a point solution may not be interested in Advance. Another reason why users may be loth to upgrade is that Advance is technology that uses Ingres as the database engine, whereas ManMan users, if they are using a database, are probably using TurboImage. Indeed, this could be one of the reasons why Hewlett-Packard Co has been slow in coming forward to endorse Advance as the ManMan user upgrade path. In these days of open systems, locking users into a certain database – particularly if its not your own – does not look good. So, Ask is now selling User Data Management Reporting Systems, better known as UDMS, from Denver, Colorado-based Interactive System Software Inc along with Release 8.0 of ManMan. This bi-directional report writer offers multiple views of data held in flat files or in databases and can be used to link into Ingres for those that want to move on up to Advance or it can be used to link ManMan with other databases. Earlier this year (CI No 1,622), UDMS was available only on VAXes but, according to Ken Elphick, UDMS sales manager at Access Technology in the UK, version 4.0 has been ported to HP/UX, MPE/XL and SunOS systems with versions for Ultrix and AIX to follow. The first Advance product, General Ledger, meanwhile, will be released this year, but the full modular suite is several years away as it needs to be underpinned by distributed database technology from Ask Ingres.
