American Flows With IBM MQ Series
American Software Inc. (Atlanta) announces it is bringing IBM MQ Series functionality to its Flow Manufacturing solution. IBM MQ Series will allow Flow Manufacturing users to interact with a variety of ERP applications available to the AS/400 market.
Flow Manufacturing addresses business functions such as product engineering, shop floor design and production lien scheduling. The solution provides a set of management tools to streamline these activities and is designed to allow a corporation to reduce costs, expand market share and increase customer responsiveness.
American Software will recommend MQ Series to its customers, although these same customers are free to choose another middleware product. "We found that our customers weren't that knowledgeable about middleware and needed guidance," says Lloyd Perrine, product marketing manager for American's Flow Manufacturing. "IBM MQ Series supports up to 30 different platforms, and we think it is the best product to recommend to our customers."
With MQ Series support, American's expectation is that customers will be able to extend their ERP applications--whether they are from Baan, SAP, J.D. Edwards, MAPICS, SSA or a number of other vendors--to take advantage of Flow's productivity improvements.
In other news, American Software announces the release of flow manufacturing interfaces for Baan and SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) products, which will allow integration into both infrastructures without having to change any existing ERP functions.
In addition, the company announces FlowConX, an Open Applications Group (OAG)-compliant Application Programming Interface (API). FlowConX will provide API interfaces to OAG-complaint packages such as J.D. Edwards and SSA, and will provide integration between ERP packages and flow-manufacturing packages.
-- J. Martin