AMAPS MRP, once old, is new again

AMAPS, once the gold standard for MRP II software in the 1980s, is back. Not that it ever really went away.

A small team of die-hard loyalists from Comserv, the company that originally developed AMAPS, formed Xantel, an Eagan, Minn.-based vendor that has quietly continued to support and enhance the enterprise application.

Dun & Bradstreet shut the doors on what was Comserv when it acquired MSA in 1992. Comserv had been acquired by MSA in 1986.

Xantel recently completed migration of the original mainframe-COBOL based system to the UNIX and NT world, renaming the product AMAPS+Plus. The company currently supports 60 companies with a total of 150 installations. It has nine installations of AMAPS+Plus in new accounts, and is talking with other interested companies.

"Because of the way it is built, you can run it on IBM MVS/VSE, UNIX, or NT with the database server of your choice," says Warren Hinze, Xantel president and a former executive with Comserv.

Hinze says Micro Focus's NetExpress COBOL compiler for the PC allowed the code to be taken directly to the PC without rewriting or modifying it. The core product has more than three million lines of code that is, after all these years, "as bug-free as software gets," he says.

"What this gives you is all the strength of an application that has run for many years—one that is combat proven, with an intelligent graphical user interface [GUI] that does much more than a simple GUI," Hinze maintains.

"AMAPS+Plus has tremendous flexibility to be integrated into and with any other vendor's application and most especially, with any homegrown legacy system—within a matter of hours."

One of the bedrocks of the original AMAPS was its three-tier architecture, engineered by Comserv before three-tier and its successor, the infamous n-tier, were ever branded. The architecture separates the user interface, business rules, and database coding, enabling the application to easily migrate to various computing environments. The three-tier architecture also made it easier to subsequently recompile the business logic and wrapper with objects that can run today on either UNIX or NT platforms.

Xantel has essentially merged the original AMAPS/Q (IBM mainframe-based) and AMAPS/3000 (for the HP 3000 platform) into one product. The system can be integrated with any program that supports ActiveX.

Though Comserv, MSA, and DBS are no more, AMAPS lives on, supported by a dedicated team of developers with a combined total experience base with the product of more than 350 man-years.