By William Fellows
Now under new management, the Baan Co NV store is being fitted out the way it should have been a long time ago, and an integrated CRM and ERP package which at the moment goes by the code name Corelli is being prepared for release.
Baan will dress up the product (named for the seventeenth century Italian composer of trio sonatas and concertos) for the outside world, but essentially it has fully integrated the FrontOffice CRM software from its Aurum Software acquisition into its Baan ERP and other supply chain suites. In addition Baan will tout the final integration of the logistics and product data management functionality it bought with Prolog and CapLogistics. It is expected to give away the CRM functionality in Corelli and its roadshow will pronounce ERP as we knew it is dead and will seek credit as an enterprise business process company.
Not only did the slump in ERP sales last spring hurt Baan badly, it also slipped and lost much ground to competitors by failing to understand that customers in its market typically want to buy as much product as they can from as few vendors as possible. Those with end-to-end solutions win. Baan crucially failed to integrate application functions from its acquisitions and paid the price. Now it has finally componentizing these functions as modules which can be pieced together.
The wrappers it will give Corelli include the ability for customers to automatically implement 15 business processes (identified, it claims, from the study of global industries) that it has integrated in Corelli. Baan claims to have a specific methodology for identifying and modeling business processes and the way they are linked together. It has also engaged ERP consultant Benchmarking Partners Inc to offer customers intelligence on business processes in particular industries; what’s standard and how they might differentiate. The methodology is said to identify the tools required to implement and web- enable any given process and generate links to related processes and applications. Corelli will enable components from ERP, CRM, supply chain and e-business to be integrated in a single front- to-back-end application or process.
Baan’s next challenge will be to close the loop on analytics. Smitten with CRM, the industry has paid only lip service to using data from integrated back-end/front-end applications to develop customer lifecycle services over and above discreet marketing processes. Only then will users get a real return on their CRM investment, so the analysts’ mantra goes.
Unlike SAP and Oracle, Baan has shunned the portal as a way of slicing and dicing software in every conceivable way to sell to customers. It has apparently found that its customers are not interested in marketplaces or communities, they just want to get jobs done. While the portal isn’t the way Baan will sell next generation products, they will, including Corelli, be cross- platform programs.
