Made2Manage v.7

[Sandi Kallas]

We have to upgrade either our M2M or switch to a new ERP software
platform. I spoke to Alice Chambers with M2M and she said that v. 7
is due out in September. She said that it will be based on a .NET
platform. What the heck does this mean? We are still using v. 3.1
and don't think it would be wise to upgrade to the current version of
M2M if the whole platform is changing so soon. We have to do
something though because v. 3.1 only partially works on Windows 7
workstations with VirtualXP and Windows 8 is coming out at the end of
the year with even more changes to the OS than the jump from XP to 7.
In my opinion, we will probably be better off waiting for M2M v.7, but
I can't help but wonder if the hardware and server requirements are
going to be much different than what M2M is now quoting us. Does
anyone know what's going on?

Sandi Kallas
Criterion Machine Works

[Michael Farr]

If it were me, and we went from 3.2 to 5.6 three years ago, (we are now on 6.1 as of last year) I would move to 6.1. Even though 7 will be out at the end of the year I would wait 3-6 months to move to it.
The move to either platform will be _expensive_ requiring a new server and test and development time. It is well worth the move as there are so many enhanced features like Shop Floor Manager as well as being in a SQL environment, the system is much more stable and disaster planning and recovery are greatly enhanced.

Thanks and regards,
Michael C. Farr
Vice President, Operations
Sierra Monitor Corporation
1991 Tarob Court
Milpitas, CA 95035
(: 408-964-4451
(: 408-262-1098
(: mf...@sierramonitor.com
www.sierramonitor.com

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[Brent Marcus]

Hi Sandi.

The .Net is a brand new build of M2M, developed in India with very little of the existing code structure. It's essentially a brand new product. For me, it will be treated as a brand new product, which means that it has no incumbent status and sits level with Great Plains / Dynamics and the Best ERP (formerly MAS90)

What Consona has done is to move customers to the Intuitive code base. Intuitive is an ERP that Consona acquired several years back. Along with the ERP system, they also purchased a development shop in India. M2M 7.0 was developed by the Intuitive team in India rather than by the Made2Manage team in Indianapolis. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? I don't really know. What I do know is that 7.0 is not M2M as we know it. You will be dealing with an entirely new ERP system. Obviously, M2M paradigms will be supplanted by Intuitive methodologies. Again, whether this is good or bad can be debated, but your existing knowledge base with M2M is rendered useless. You will be working with a completely new product.

If you have a lot of data and history with M2M, I would advise going to the 6.01 product, as it is a true M2M system. If not, then you may want to evaluate M2M 7.0 along with Dynamics, Best, Oracle and the rest and make your decision from the broader field.

Just my opinion.

Brent A. Marcus
Director of Information Technologies
Reinhold Industries, Inc.
(562) 321-6666 Direct (949) 232-4216 Cell

-----Original Message-----
From: lam2m...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lam2m...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Sandi Kallas
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2012 2:42 PM
To: Los Angeles Area Made2Manage User Group
Subject: [lam2musers] Made2Manage v.7

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[Keller,Rod]

The .Net version of M2M has great promise but will be a long time in the
making or at least in making it stable. If I were in the market for a
new ERP system today I would look at a product called Global Shop,
depending on the size of your company and its operations. M2M has been a
tremendous benefit to us but their support is very expensive for what is
received. Upgrading to M2M 6.01 would most likely be the least
disruptive path but you will have to retrain everyone so maybe it is
time to shop around.

Rod Keller

[Sheryl Bower]

Have any of you been reading the articles that state ERP is a dying industry?  It seems the predictions will be that you'll just by the cloud services you need.  Was wondering if you had seen these articles and what your thoughts were?

[Brent Marcus]

SAS or software as a service is the desire of the industry. It’s a sweet deal for the software providers. Currently, if a customer stops paying maintenance for Made2Manage, they lose the marginal at best, technical support and cut off the upgrade path.  Currently, the upgrade path is enough to pay maintenance for. But for customers who don’t plan to upgrade to the next version, they could easily opt to not pay maintenance and save $30K a year. Especially with the move to .Net, this is a challenge Consona constantly faces. I could not justify the costs of maintenance for the “support” that Consona provides.

 

Software as a service solves this issue for the vendor. The benefits to the vendor are:

 

·         Single, unified hardware platform.

·         Single software version to support.

·         Guaranteed revenue stream.

 

Benefits to customer:

 

·         Assurance that they have the latest software version and patches.

·         Reduced hardware needs.

·         Universal accessibility.

 

Problems:

 

·         The internet (Cloud) isn’t fast enough to offer a viable SAS based ERP at this time.  Transaction time is prohibitive.

·         The internet isn’t even close to reliable enough to put critical business functions on.  Walmart and Amazon have private backbones, small business cannot afford the same.

·         The cost will be substantially higher to the customer.

 

The industry leans toward SAS because SAS provides greater benefit to providers than customers.  Eventually, Cloud based SAS will dominate, but the infrastructure of the internet backbone will need to be significantly increased and the speed of ISP to customer links will need to be 100mbps or better for it to be viable.

 

 

Brent A. Marcus

Director of Information Technologies

Reinhold Industries, Inc.

(562) 321-6666 Direct (949) 232-4216 Cell

 

 

 

Reinhold Proprietary Information Statement:
The information contained herein and/or attached is Reinhold Industries Proprietary Information and is disclosed in confidence. This information shall not be used, disclosed to others or reproduced without the express written consent of Reinhold Industries, Incorporated.

Reinhold Export Control Statement:
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[Thomas D. Erb]

Loss of control and fast access to your data is a problem with the cloud. We use some IE extension to view our data – this wouldn’t work over the web.

 

 

From: lam2m...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lam2m...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Brent Marcus

Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 10:20 AM
To: 'lam2m...@googlegroups.com'

Subject: RE: [lam2musers] Future of ERP

 

 

SAS or software as a service is the desire of the industry. It’s a sweet deal for the software providers. Currently, if a customer stops paying maintenance for Made2Manage, they lose the marginal at best, technical support and cut off the upgrade path.  Currently, the upgrade path is enough to pay maintenance for. But for customers who don’t plan to upgrade to the next version, they could easily opt to not pay maintenance and save $30K a year. Especially with the move to .Net, this is a challenge Consona constantly faces. I could not justify the costs of maintenance for the “support” that Consona provides.

 

Software as a service solves this issue for the vendor. The benefits to the vendor are:

 

·         Single, unified hardware platform.

·         Single software version to support.

·         Guaranteed revenue stream.

 

Benefits to customer:

 

·         Assurance that they have the latest software version and patches.

·         Reduced hardware needs.

·         Universal accessibility.

 

Problems:

 

·         The internet (Cloud) isn’t fast enough to offer a viable SAS based ERP at this time.  Transaction time is prohibitive.

·         The internet isn’t even close to reliable enough to put critical business functions on.  Walmart and Amazon have private backbones, small business cannot afford the same.

·         The cost will be substantially higher to the customer.

 

The industry leans toward SAS because SAS provides greater benefit to providers than customers.  Eventually, Cloud based SAS will dominate, but the infrastructure of the internet backbone will need to be significantly increased and the speed of ISP to customer links will need to be 100mbps or better for it to be viable.

 

 

Brent A. Marcus

Director of Information Technologies

Reinhold Industries, Inc.

(562) 321-6666 Direct (949) 232-4216 Cell

 

 

 

From: lam2m...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lam2m...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Sheryl Bower

Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 6:54 AM
To: LA Users Group
Subject: [lam2musers] Future of ERP

 

 

Have any of you been reading the articles that state ERP is a dying industry?  It seems the predictions will be that you'll just by the cloud services you need.  Was wondering if you had seen these articles and what your thoughts were?

Reinhold Proprietary Information Statement:
The information contained herein and/or attached is Reinhold Industries Proprietary Information and is disclosed in confidence. This information shall not be used, disclosed to others or reproduced without the express written consent of Reinhold Industries, Incorporated.

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[Sheryl Bower]

I recently read where some newer technology is coming available that will address the speed problem.  I'm not sure how far off it is from implementation though.
 

---

From: thoma...@gmail.com

To: lam2m...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [lam2musers] Future of ERP

Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:38:10 -0400

[Brent Marcus]

The only thing that will really address the speed issue is faster internet speeds.

 

We run our LAN’s at gigabit speeds. Most “broadband” is 3 to 5 megabit download and sub-1 megabit upload. How many users are really going to accept a thousand fold decrease in response to keyboard and mouse input?

 

No matter how hard Microsoft and Oracle push, it won’t happen until backbone speeds are sufficient to provide a smooth and responsive user experience. Also, Tom brings up a good point, beyond access to your data, this entails placing vital financial data on the hard drives of third party vendors.  Many companies will be hesitant to embrace this.

[Sandi Kallas]

Thank you for all your replies.  When I contacted Made2Manage, I was told that they no longer offer the web service version that was such a big deal 8-10 years ago.  I find that interesting in light of the the direction this conversation has taken.  Frankly, I wouldn't want our company's data on a third-party site for security.  The internet just isn't secure enough yet for my comfort. 

 

Of course, you guys have theories, so I'll throw this out there:  Do you think the SQL version of M2M is going to run the same course as the VFP version?  How long will it be before you won't be able to run it on the newest workstation OS?

 

You've given us a lot to think about and we appreciate the information and input.

[Ray Collazo]

I would have to disagree with most of the Death-trumpeters out there: ERP is not infact "Dying", but is being monetized by the SAAS crowd whom want to take services which used to be maintenance-fee-driven and turn them around into a more stable revenue stream (for them).

 

Yes: The cloud makes things easier for the work to become de-centralized and be sharable among multiple locations on the Web. What most fail to show is that the ugly little secret is that suddenly the service, which once-upon-a-time you could quite easily detatch yourself from the Vendor and do stuff on your Own support, suddenly makes your Data hostage to the one Providers monthly fees, for ever and ever.

 

And lord help you if your Internet ever *gasp* Goes Down, as often happens in this current world where Consumer trends towards the higher-bandwidth usage is dragging down net reactivity on an almost daily basis.

 

This whole "Cloud" buzzword is just that: Buzz. Treat it as such, and realize that theres a more money-driven reality behind it.

 

Much of what has been trumpeted as allowing better application mobility I've already been doing for Years: I can quite happily work from home using an RDP tunnel over a secure SSL connection thru our corporate Internet gateway running Linux. Many of my employees quite happily do the same thing if they need outside access.

 

Anyway, Thats my opinion.

-----Original Message-----
From: lam2m...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lam2m...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Sheryl Bower
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 6:54 AM
To: LA Users Group
Subject: [lam2musers] Future of ERP

Have any of you been reading the articles that state ERP is a dying industry?  It seems the predictions will be that you'll just by the cloud services you need.  Was wondering if you had seen these articles and what your thoughts were?

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[Anthony Agpaoa]

What Ray Said.... Ditto

[Sandi Kallas]

Here are some questions for those of you who have been on M2M for a decade or more: 

 

 

How much has the user interface changed since version 3.1? Does SQL provide more flexibility? 

 

According to the literature M2M sent me, we would need to have VFP 9 as part of the M2M package.  Are they really still using Visual Foxpro??????   Is that the primary reporting platform, or have they built in something more user-friendly?

[Brent Marcus]

The user interface hasn’t changed at all since the upgrade to 3.0 – I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, my opinion is the interface works well. Browse screens have been modernized and have far more flexibility, but the basic layout of toolbars and screens is about the same.

 

They do still use Foxpro, again not sure that’s a bad thing. I find it much more powerful than the SQL reporting tools. If you want to do custom reports, you do have options. The Advanced Reporting tool (extra cost) is excellent. There are also Crystal Reports and R&R Reporting available, though I think Advanced Reporting is superior to both for M2M tasks.

 

SQL provides stability above all else. It is an enterprise level data engine. Pretty well rock solid. SQL is slower than DBF’s on the same hardware, but hardware is cheap these days and the stability is so much better that it’s well worth the loss of speed. With SQL you virtually never need worry about data corruption.

 

Regards;

 

Brent A. Marcus

Director of Information Technologies

Reinhold Industries, Inc.

(562) 321-6666 Direct (949) 232-4216 Cell

 

 

 

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