Enterprise application provider Baan is jumping into the
supply-chain and product lifecycle management arenas with plans to
tap its installed ERP base to increase business in these new
product lines.
Baan joins traditional ERP stalwarts SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft
which have begun pushing their installed base of back-office
systems to gain ground in markets for systems such as SCM (supply
chain management) which, typically, extend outside a company's four
walls but rely on ERP workhorses for critical data.
Yesterday Baan unveiled iBaan for SCM, a solution and a business
unit designed to allow customers to optimise relationships between
key enterprise processes of sourcing, manufacturing, warehousing,
transportation, and fulfilment. It also rolled out PLM (product
lifecycle) software aimed at helping businesses manage all aspects
of the product lifecycle within one virtual environment to enhance
manufacturing processes.
iBaan for SCM combines software, applied business intelligence and
professional services to help organisations maximise and improve
throughput, inventory, supplier relations, performance, and
logistics execution. The solution will be tightly integrated into
Baan's ERP solutions with functionality such as APS (advanced
planning and scheduling) directly embedded in Baan ERP, said Joe
Phelan, director of product management for Baan's new supply chain
business unit.
"In the past, APS has often been sold as an add-on," Phelan said.
"What you had was an integration aspect where you had to transfer a
lot of data from the ERP backbone. You can eliminate those steps,
[and] you can have sharing of data and decrease the recognition
time [to react to] events."