Baan Co yesterday announced the acquisition of Caps Logistics Inc, a transportation planning software company, as part of its move to fill the gaps in its supply chain management portfolio (CI No 3,498). Baan now plans to continue to add to its supply chain software suite with the purchase of a company with warehousing expertise, according to the supply-chain management division’s president, Amal Johnson, who was speaking last week in London. Baan is focusing on building up its expertise in supply chain management, a market which up until now has been dominated by Manugistics and i2Technologies, but has become an area of expansion for the big enterprise resource planning vendors such as SAP AG. The Dutch ERP company is acquiring Cap Logistics, which will become a unit of Baan, through a stock swap, but revealed no further financial details of the deal. In the near term, CAPS Logistics, which develops supply chain network design, transportation planning, and route planning & scheduling software, will continue to operate under its current name in North America. CAPS Logistics In separate news Baan also announced the availability of BaanERP. The product is being launched initially in American English, with German, Dutch and Japanese (Kanji) versions to follow. The software suite will initially run with SQL Server, Oracle and Informix databases.
