About MWK Software

The original Least Cost Charge Calculation Program was written in 1982 for a high alloy foundry. The program was written in BASIC and ran on an Apple II. The program considered 15 elements and up to 20 melt stocks. It took five minutes to calculate a charge. The client estimated that the program would reduce their costs by $150,000 a year.

The first commercially available version of the program ran on an IBM PC and was written in Pascal. Calculation time was reduced significantly. Features and enhancements were added to the program as more and more foundries and secondary smelters used the program.

The program has grown in sophistication from the first version that ran from a 5¼ floppy disk in less than 640 Kbytes of memory. The current version is now Windows compliant. One feature of the program that has been preserved is that it has no known errors.

We have sold over 150 copies the program. The program is used by high & low alloy steel and gray & ductile iron foundries. The program is also used by numerous seconday aluminum and copper smelters.

We have two goals:
The first is to respond to our customer's requests for features and ease of use. New features are continually added to meet the changing needs of our customers.

The second goal is to continue to provide a program that has no known errors. When a customer reports a problem, all of our attention is focused on fixing the problem and then providing all of our customers with a new, corrected program.

Our staff:

Web Master: Peter R. Mahnke. Peter normally spends his time designing very exotic web sites for big bucks, Wall Street type companies. He is responsible for the quick response time and ease of use of our web site.

Nick Motley: Nick is my go to person for programming problems. Nick was my student when I was teaching computing at Milwaukee Area Technical College and now, like all good students, he has gone beyond his teacher and become a better programmer. Nice to have someone like Nick to rely on.

Utility Infielder: Mark W. Kachel. I wrote the program and I am responsible for customer support. My desire for a stress free working environment is the main reason the program has no known errors. I have a BA in mathematics and an MS in industrial engineering. I am also an American Society for Quality Certified Quality Engineer and Certified Reliability Engineer.