IBM Corp’s Global Services division teamed up with Baan Co NV this week to open Big Blue’s first dedicated implementation factory designed to deliver pre-configured IBM hardware with Baan’s ERP, front office and supply chain software solutions. Baan is the first vendor IBM is partnering with at its new facility in Atlanta but the company says it plans to add other vendors to its implementation program as well as adding a second facility in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mike Plymack, IBM’s Baan practice executive in its Global Services division, said the center would work to develop best of breed IBM/Baan solutions, based on company size, industry and culture, that will enable customers to speed both implementation time and the time it takes to integrate Baan software with other IT systems, typically, in Baan’s case, other manufacturing systems.

As well as working on pre-configured ERP implementations, Plymack said IBM would also develop methodologies to speed the deployment of Baan’s front office and supply chain solutions. Big Blue will integrate the software on IBM hardware running Windows NT, Unix, AS400 and mainframe operating systems and DB2, Oracle, Informix or SQL databases. The aim, he said, is to get some of the tricky design and integration work, at least 20% of it, out of the way at IBM’s factory before starting to deploy the systems on site and to reduce the redundancy when deploying the same product for different companies. There’s no need to duplicate all that work twice, he said. What we’re trying to do is develop a series of templates that smooth that process and keep it as consistent as possible from site to site. Plymack said.

IBM chose to work with Baan first because the two companies already have a long-standing relationship and because Baan offers software products across the board, from front to back end. If we went with SAP, we’d have had to bring in other partners, like Trilogy or i2 to cater for the other front end and supply chain modules, he said. Before implementing any system, customers first get to test it out at the factory, either directly or remotely, by simulating their live customer environment and making any necessary changes before taking it live. As part of the announcement IBM Global Services will resell Baan software to customers from North America and Baan will offer IBM’s DB2 database. Microsoft Running Pilot ASP Program