I came across the following "ERP Evaluation Center" site which is very interesting: http://www.erpevaluation.com

This site allows you to enter all the vital statistics of industry, business processes, scale and type of operations, IT environment and so on then comes up with a number of recommended packages and presents all sorts of analyses.

The first point that the exercise did confirme for me is that SAA is not even trying to market ERP LN, but it does list BaanV, BPCS, PRMS and Masterpiece as candidates.

Using our company's vital statistics 23 packages were progressively excluded from the initial 61 candidates as we worked through the various screens. The result was that SAP and Oracle were at the top closely followed by Intentia then Peoplesoft, with BaanV a long way down the list.

Had ERP-LN been in the list it would have faired better but from what I have gleaned from the many LN documents downloaded from the support site and other sources the I doubt that it would get any where near the top of the ranking.

It is interesting that SSA's internal (brain washing) document which purports to use Gartner Decision criteria places ERP LN very near the top ranking (in bar-charts at least). I am not entirely clear on just what the Gartner decision criteria are and which criteria may have been omited for sake of good scores. The ones that are presented are limited to various application functionalities and technical architecture. Surely any evaluation must also address the Vendor company's financial characteristics, scale of operation, track record, market acceptance/valuation as indicators to the likelihood of it lasting the distance. (Baan and Invensys both failed miserably in this respect although at the time had a remarkable product to market)

Whatever the true situation, it seems that there a very few if any Customers anywhere in the world who are in a position to tell us from experience. The total as a couple of weeks ago seemed to be less than 20 sites. There should be many hundreds by now. Perhaps we need to wait for Boeing.

If there are any Customers who have or who are installing please let us know. It would even be useful to hear from the beta test sites. If we don't hear from some live Customers soon we will begin to think that there has been misrepresentation as to the viability, validity and availability of the product.

Terry

The ranking just depends on the criteria set. Baan 6.1 (SSA ERP LN) is a nice product from Gartner's perspective.
The problem is the golden days of ERP has gone. Now there are only SME customers. For SME market, Baan is a complex product to use. The worse is SSA does not know how to build up channels to market, sell and implement the product. Partly because selling ERP is not profitable now. A lot of ERP vendors are still struggling.

Another problem with Baan/SSA is that, they never listen to needs in the market or the install base. All the new features are base on the customers who are willing to pay the money for that. That's why Baan5.0 could not convince the install base to upgrade. Now comes Baan6.1, it seems better but still not address some common requirements from the market. It has some good features (e.g. Assembly control, handling unit, cross docking, unit effectivity), but only a few manufacturers can benefit from it.

We have just been visited by an exprienced SSA employee who spent the day evaluating our current implementation and our business process with the IT department and the business key users. The objective is to see if we can benefit from a migration to the latest release.

It is easier to keep existing customers than it is win new ones. The evaluation, migration and implementation of an ERP system is not something that can be done in six months.

Give SSA some more time. So far they have been delivering what they announced.

...We have just been visited by an exprienced SSA employee...
Caveat emptor: Irrespective of his/her Job Title that person is part of the sales team who's mission was to assess what new functionality he/she could sell you and to assess your pain-threshold as to price. (A really great guy who knows his stuff and would never tell you anything that wasn't straight-up)

If it turns out that there wouldn't be much additional revenue for SSA then I am sure you will be advised that the new version doesn't really have much additional functionality that would benefit your operations. Alternatively, you will decide that the new features are not really worth the consulting and migration fees and that you will be better served by waiting for the next release.


...Give SSA some more time. So far they have been delivering what they announced...
Have they: SSA have thousands of customers on Baan with hundreds of thousands of license seats. It appears that they have delivered software to only a very very small number of customers. I do not classify this as delivering what they announced. We have not actually heard from any of these people on this baanboard or other forums.


...The evaluation, migration and implementation of an ERP system is not something that can be done in six months....
I think you could be surprised by many such projects. But the situation that we were originally addressing was the migration from an earlier version of software written by the same company using essential the same development framework/language etc and not green-field implementation. In small scale migrations - say 200 or less users, I can't see why it has to take anything like that time. Whilst there are some very large scale implementations there are many that are considerable less than 200 users.

Terry

The worse is SSA does not know how to build up channels to market, sell and implement the product...

Agree entirely. What is more, SSA have no intention of developing a competence in marketing to new-prospects. SSA's business strategy is very good from their side of the business. They have a suite of very good legacy applications that their customer base is quite happy with and willing to pay a fairly high price for ongoing support. This applies particularly with the Baan products that had a low entry-cost but high on-going maintenance cost.

The cost to provide this support is very low for the now long-installed and virtually bug-free software. Many customers are self-supporting yet continue to pay the annual fees for the sake of being entitled to free upgrades.

This is a very lucrative business. Why would SSA want to replace the stable software with a new version that is bound to have some bugs and even if it were bug-free, customers would have to place a lot of support calls just for hand-holding advice.

They would be CRAZY if they were to replace the software without lucrative consulting/migration contracts. But they would also be considered to be honorable in that they were prepared to follow the spirit of the contracts originally entered into by Baan. They may also have new customers seeking them out on the basis of their reputation and the functionality of the product.

Terry

:) The performance evaluation of SSA for the sales people is wrong. The revenue mainly comes from the install base. The sales guys have no motivation to sell products into new accounts. For new accounts, they would select the products which have less competitors. SSA is good at accounting but bad at sales and marketing. It carries too many products. The resource put on R&D, presales, support and consulting is thin.

I can only say BaanERP is still a very nice product. One of my customers will go live on 6.1 at coming new year. I will tell you whether it is success or not.

I think tritonbaan has got it right but I would be a little more generous in evaluating the technique for performance evaluation of sales reps.

I think SSA has to meet strict budgets set by accountants who are very good at their jobs. I expect that Cererus Capital Management expect a very high return on their investment -- investment is their sole business. Atlantic Partners were brought in with a 15% stake to provide IT Systems/market expertise so as to allow SSA to be run by accountants without need to have to rely on Propeller-Head or Marketing-Guru executive/employees for domain knowledge.

I think they do have some high-level silver-tongue salemen who (would probalby be equally at home with used cars or insurance) to address non- technical upper management. Bear in mind that it is highly unlikely that SSA will ever sell to new blue-chip customers. These customers will want to deal with the SAP/Oracle/(Peoplesofts) who's worth is 20 to 30 times that of SSA. (Boeing and the other big US customers are existing Baan customers.)

Whilst SSA have a number of clear strengths, not the least of which is that they "saved" the Baan product, the biggest dissappointment that I see is that they are hell-bent on increasing the revenue from existing customers. It seems that they are quite happy to use upgrades to software to do this.

I heard one of the "silver-tongues" yesterday illustrate the SSA "Value Proposition" as customer being able to upgrade to new release for say $1million where it may cost $5million install and migrate to likes of SAP. The customer thought he was entitled to the software for $zero because he paid annual Support ? That would be value that would keep the customer for life?

Terry