News Briefs and Product Shorts

CMS to Develop Electronic Kanban System for Lean Ohio Manufacturer

CMS Manufacturing Systems has committed to developing an electronic version of the paper-based "kanban" manufacturing process, which was pioneered by the Japanese carmaker Toyota, for a new client in Ohio, the company announced last week. Thetford/Norcold, a manufacturer of refrigeration and sanitation products for boats and RVs based in Sidney, Ohio, chose the integrated CMS/400 ERP package in large part due to CMS's willingness to work with Thetford/Norcold to adapt the software to meet its needs, officials with the manufacturer said. As part of the software and service engagement, CMS and Thetford/Norcold will work to develop new electronic versions of the paper kanban cards the company uses as part of its Toyota Production System (kanban refers to a production methodology developed by Toyota that uses just-in-time principles at all stages of manufacturing). Thetford/Norcold has a highly evolved kanban implementation, according to William Neeve, president of the manufacturing consultant Cycle Time Management. "Few companies have embraced the Toyota Production System as comprehensively and effectively as Thetford/Norcold," he says. After developing the e-kanban system, CMS says, it will make it available as part of its CMS/400 package. CMS will also develop a new customer service processing capability that will enable Thetford/Norcold to more efficiently find information.

Paxar Partners with Cybra for OS/400-based RFID Middleware

Cybra, the developer of OS/400 barcode software, and Paxar, a provider of hardware, software, and services for tracking products in the apparel supply chain, have teamed up to help manufacturers and distributors comply with retail behemoth Wal-Mart's radio frequency identification (RFID) initiative. The partnership, which was announced last week, calls for the two companies to integrate Paxar's new Monarch 9855 RFID label printer with OS/400 applications using Cybra's barcode and RFID middleware, called MarkMagic/400 Barcode Label and SM@RT Forms. According to Paxar's announcement, the Version 5.1 release of Cybra's software has the capability to write to an RFID tag using data from an OS/400 application. Meanwhile, Paxar plans to offer the capability to read and write to the type of RFID tag (Class 1, Gen 2) that Wal-Mart has indicated it will require its suppliers to use. The Monarch 9855 printer will be available mid-year, Paxar says. The partnership with Cybra is the first of many RFID-related partnerships that Paxar, which brings in about $600 million in revenue per year, will be announcing.

Aspen Pet Picks Logility for OS/400 Supply Chain Planning

Aspen Pet Products, manufacturer of Booda Bone dog chewables, has picked Logility's supply chain planning software, the software company announced last week. The Denver, Colorado, manufacturer will install certain components of the Logility Voyager Solutions suite to improve its inventory management, increase forecast accuracy, and enable collaboration between sales and marketing. "We supply thousands of pet stores throughout North America, including very large channel masters," says Aspen Pet's vice president of operations, Rhett Butler. "We need a robust supply chain planning solution that can help reduce stock-outs and obsolete inventory, and increase inventory turns." The software will run on an iSeries server.

Lakeview's Data Replication Software Now Supports DB2 UDB on Unix, Windows

Lakeview Technology's OmniReplicator database replication software now supports IBM's DB2 UDB on Unix, Linux, and Windows servers, the Chicago software maker announced last week. With OmniReplicator Version 4.0.1, users can now replicate databases among DB2 UDB, DB2/400, Informix (owned by IBM), Oracle, Microsoft, and Sybase relational database management systems. Version 4.0.1 also has a new incremental commit feature, designed to minimize downtime by reducing the number of affected tables to only those that have had a change since the last commit, thereby saving time, effort, and money, Lakeview says.

PeopleSoft Signs OEM Agreement with Ascential for Integration Software

PeopleSoft will be reselling Ascential Software's data integration solutions for its EnterpriseOne (formerly J.D. Edwards OneWorld) ERP suite, the companies recently announced. The agreement calls for PeopleSoft to resell Ascential's DataStage Server and Ascential PACKs software for its PeopleSoft Enterprise and EnterpriseOne ERP suites. There is also an OEM component of the agreement that calls for Ascential's DataStage extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tool to be embedded into PeopleSoft's enterprise performance management (EPM) software immediately, and for embedding Ascential's MetaStage data integration software into the PeopleSoft EPM later this year. PeopleSoft also has plans to resell Ascential PACKs for SAP, Siebel, and Oracle enterprise applications.

Mixed Signals: Invensys Marcam Unit's Commitment to OS/400

Invensys, which sold its struggling Baan ERP software unit to SSA Global last year, reaffirmed its commitment to its OS/400 installed base last week through its Avantis business unit (formerly Marcam). The Foxboro, Massachusetts, subsidiary of the English industrial giant says the new 3.2 release of its Avantis.XA asset management application contains a number of new features that will enhance productivity for users of "IBM's solid AS/400 hardware." While Avantis didn't explain the new enhancements, Bill Clark, an Avantis.XA user and president of the product's user group, had this to say of the new release: "Rather than trying to tell us what product enhancements they thought we needed, Avantis made the extra effort to find out what additional features were most important to us, the long-time users of Avantis.XA." While the company highlighted its continued support for its 20-year-old Avantis.XA line, the Avantis Web site also welcomes inquiries from Avantis.XA customers on how to migrate to Avantis.PRO, the company's flagship 32-bit client/server enterprise asset management (EAM) suite for Windows and Unix servers; there is no such invitation for moving from Avantis.PRO to Avantis.XA on its Web site. The company formed a technology alliance with Microsoft concerning the .NET framework last spring.