Baan
Releases New Supply Chain Products
S. McVey- November 4th, 1999
Event
Summary
Baan Co. recently announced the release of two additional modules in its Supply
Chain Solutions suite: BaanSCS Planner 2.0 for factory planning, and BaanSCS
Order Promising 1.0 for order acceptance. Planner 2.0 is intended to help companies
profitably fulfill customer orders by planning and streamlining all activities.
Enhancements over the previous versions include dynamic evaluation of alternate
sources of material suppliers, alternate sourcing decisions based on due date
or financial objectives, and improved inventory and logistics planning functionality.
A new module, Order Promising 1.0, features available-to-promise (ATP) and capable-to-promise
(CTP) checking, so called "Profitable-to-Promise" checking, alternate order
fulfillment, and order splitting. Both applications are designed to work with
other Baan Supply Chain Solutions offerings including: Supply Chain Scheduler
(Advanced Manufacturing Synchronization), Execution (Synchronized Manufacturing
Execution), Demand Planner (Enterprise Demand Planning), Supply Chain Designer
(Supply Chain Modeling & Optimization), and Supply Chain Coordinator (Tactical
Supply Chain Planning), and the RoutePro (Vehicle Routing & Scheduling), and
TransPro (Shipment Plan Optimization) families.
Market
Impact
Baan's recent releases maintain the pressure on other ERP vendors to improve
and expand their supply chain management capabilities. Of the two new releases,
Baan stands to gain the most from the Order Promising module, although it is
unlikely that this first 1.0 release can truly offer clients a stable solution.
In addition, Order Promising includes features, such as order splitting, that
have already been addressed in competitive packages like SAP APO and i2 Rhythm.
While Baan's release is a necessary move to retain some visibility in the advanced
order promising market, it remains to be seen whether the ERP vendor can generate
customer acceptance for the new offering given an already crowded marketplace.
At this point, the only top five ERP vendor behind Baan in SCM functionality
is Geac, which still lacks a competitive advanced order promising offering and
stands to fall further behind as it diverts attention to JBA integration activities.
User
Recommendations
While Baan is moving in the right direction, users need to consider the maturity
of the product in their evaluations and make comparisons to competitive offerings.
In addition, users should not be lulled into thinking that new enhancements
to a product are new for the rest of the market. For example, Baan may tout
PTP (Profitable-to-Promise) as a significant step in the evolution of order
promising functionality. However, any respectable supply chain planning module
should enable users to define order and/or channel priorities such that the
ATP engine seeks to satisfy higher priority orders before others.