The package has been around for HP 3000s since the 1970s, and some sites have been running multimillion dollar operations with it for well over a decade. Serious improvements are coming for MANMAN customers, but not from Computer Associates (CA). An alliance of three HP 3000 suppliers has created AdvanceMan, an extensive graphical interface and client-server application for MANMAN's OMAR and MFG modules.
AdvanceMan does more than just pretty up users' OMAR and MFG screens with buttons and pull-down menus. The program lets you work in more than one MANMAN module at a time, and it eliminates the typing of commands to execute MANMAN actions. It doesn't require any changes to your existing MANMAN environments. Screens are similar in form to the original MANMAN screens, but they allow users to list sales orders, customer information and product details all at once.
One interesting aspect of AdvanceMan is that it takes up no user sessions
on the HP
3000, regardless of the number of client PCs that are interfacing to
MANMAN. According
to its designer, AdvanceMan doesn't need to use the MANMAN dispatcher,
which means
the controls on how many users are logged on are left up to AdvanceMan to
manage. For
systems that are nearing the limit of users they can support, AdvanceMan
can extend the
reach of MANMAN with the organizations.
AdvanceMan offloads screen handling, data validation and other processing to the PCs for some true client-server benefits. The technical underpinning of AdvanceMan comes courtesy of Minisoft's MiddleMan APIs. MiddleMan components reside on both the HP 3000 and the PCs. Quantum Software's Ali Sadat engineered the product, which is being offered though the sales and support operations of The Support Group (800.798.9862). Visual Basic 4.0 drives the client screens.
"We intended for it to replace as many MANMAN commands as possible," Sadat said. By working in the Windows environment, AdvanceMan also makes it possible to export MANMAN data to Excel spreadsheets in tab-delimited format.
Robert Hopper, IS director at the headquarters of Crane Valve in Rogers, Ark., said AdvanceMan shows a lot of promise for streamlining his manufacturing operation. "We've been trying to find a product like this for quite some time," he said. "Our customer service people need to be able to get at information a lot easier than they're traditionally accustomed to. This gives them a lot faster access to the information while they have the customer on the phone. They can be a lot more responsive because they don't have to log in and out of various MANMAN screens. It gives them terrific drill-down capability."
The product will require MANMAN sites to upgrade terminals to PCs, but Sadat said that's already happened at many shops. Minimum PC is a 386 with 8Mb of memory and 10Mb of disk. AdvanceMan runs on Windows 3.11, Windows 95 and Windows NT. PCs have to be attached to the HP 3000 through a TCP/IP network instead of serial port connections.
AdvanceMan's CS/MG and CS/OM versions provide GUI and client-server features for manufacturing data retrieval and order management data retrieval, respectively. The CS/100 module combines the two modules into a full transaction management product, while pulls more data validation down to the PC level. The product is priced starting at $9,500 for a 20-user license on systems up to a Series 937, and tops out with all options at $20,500 for an unlimited user license on the largest HP 3000s. Sites which already have MiddleMan installed get discounts ranging from $3,000 to $8,500.