What are the Functionality Improvements Of LN visa vis Baan 5c?

If any one has seen the implementation of Ln, please share the experiences.

How is the quality of LN in general? How is the support for LN Product.

Can an European automotive customer go for the current LN Product?

Anupam,

Refer to the SSA-ERP-LN documentation ->

Document code : P3496B US
Release : SSA® ERP LN 6.1
Document title : Functions & Features
Publication date : July 04

I am not sure if Automotive extensions are available in LN-6.1

Dear Prashanth,
thanks for the info.. I have gone thru the document.... It is very high level.
It does not give the functionality improvements with respect to Baan 5 or IV

Regards
Anupam

Regarding the quality, I think it is quite stable, not many obvious bugs.
The improvement of Baan6.1 over baaniv or baanv is a lot.
It is not surprised that not many existing Baaniv customers are moving to this version. The main reason is that the changes is so much, that the migration is equivalent to another small scale implementation.

Hi tritonbaan,

strange. I do not see many Baan IV customers migrating to Ln. I see them waiting.

How many concrete customers do you know doing a migration?

... I do not see many Baan IV customers migrating to Ln. I see them waiting.How many concrete customers do you know doing a migration?

Hi Markus

You will see quite a lot of discussion on this topic on this forum. At an SSA LN seminar a few weeks ago the Genral Manager for Australia stated that there were about 150 customers who have or who are implementing LN6.1 around the world. From other sources I think this number is on the high side and includes sites/branches of companies and also includes customers who have the software but have not yet done anything with it. The number certainly includes the beta customers from a few years ago and also new installs.

The migration to LN6.1 certainly seems to be quite involved. The biggest area of change appears to be with the database design. To address this SSA have written conversion engine/programs BUT unfortunatley they expect to have a Professional Service contract before it can be provided.

Terry

Hi Terry,

I have myself at least three customers, who got the installation media for Baan 5 and Ln at some stage in the last two years. They installed it on a test system and toyed around with it. None of them are actually migrating actively and they are still on Baan IVc4 or even IVc2.

These numbers are all markting to me and as long as I do not get a serious request from my customers about the topic, I regard the number of actual life Ln customers close to 0.

Regards

Markus

Don't think anyone is live yet on ERPln and I know only of about 5 ERPln current projects worlwide. Boeing is the most noteable.

...These numbers are all markting to me and as long as I do not get a serious request from my customers about the topic, I regard the number of actual life Ln customers close to 0...Markus

Markus

I agree with you entirely. Flip_J comments that he knows of only 5 worldwide which includes Boeing is further confirmation. In the case of Boeing I think we may see the "Dream Liner" on LN because it will be a new install rather than a migration.

I think SSA have taken the wrong approach. Whilst BaanIV is a great product users can't stay on it forever. Many companies have a policy of staying current so as to be assured of easy upgrades etc.

By not making it easy for customers to upgrade they run the risk of "cross-grading". Unless SSA provide the migration tools to convert the database free-of-charge and encourage customers with in-house capability and/or established 3rd party consultants to undertake the migration I think the product will eventually die.

From what I can see in this part of the world SSA are attempting to get lengthy professional services contracts for the whole upgrade/migration cycle starting with an expensive business process review (implying that the initial project had shortcommings or business has changed.) A crazy tactic when there are a couple of large accounts (including our company) who are eager to move but consider that the project could be done in-house with the extensive domain/business knowldge at a much lower cost than using SSA's people who are expensive and who at the moment have very little LN knowledge or experience. How many other missed opportunities are they prepared to let slip by around the world?

Terry

To make a LN a great product the documentation has to elaborate and easily available. The Sales Force and the Support people has to be adequately trained. This is not happening...
To find what is inside Baan Products one has to literally struggle to get information out...
In this area SSA should step up the work and this would enhance knowledge around ERP Ln and existing customers would like to upgrade the product.

I don't have a number of the sites that are migrating from Baaniv to Ln. If there is, it should be few. This is my original meaning.

As many of you have said, Baaniv is quite good actually. Migrating to Ln involves a lot of risk and cost because the data structure changes a lot, comparing with Baaniv. A lot of customers may think the cost is not justified for such migration.

To convince your customer to migrate to Ln, you should show them how you can keep the total cost under their budget. If you cannot sell the value to their senior management and convince them to upgrade, there is no way the IT manager can use the annual IT budget to move BaanIV to Ln.

To make a LN a great product the documentation has to elaborate and easily available. The Sales Force and the Support people has to be adequately trained. This is not happening...
To find what is inside Baan Products one has to literally struggle to get information out...
In this area SSA should step up the work and this would enhance knowledge around ERP Ln and existing customers would like to upgrade the product.

That is really a problem for SSA to fix. If they want the product to be more popular, rather than to disappear in the world, they should open the knowledge to the Baan user community and lower the cost for them to acquire the knowledge.

Don't know 'bout the rest of the world. But in the states SSA is in the middle of a group of road shows (going from town to town) showing off what LN, and some of the other SSA products can do for their customers.
They are free, so are the free webinars which i'm sure any SSA custoemr can attend.. and the global client forum... running ads in various trade magazines. I was surprised when I found and SSA ad in "DB2 Magazine"

Of course there's the ssa website which has tons of info as well...

What were you guys are looking for? I'm sort of a "bug 'em tell they tell me" sort of guy and even I haven't had to bug to hard..

Dave

...To convince your customer to migrate to Ln, you should show them how you can keep the total cost under their budget. If you cannot sell the value to their senior management and convince them to upgrade, there is no way the IT manager can use the annual IT budget to move BaanIV to Ln...

Most BaanIV customers who have been paying annual support fees have had little need for support over the period (up to 7 or 8 years by now) yet have paid a lot more in fees than the initial cost of their perpetual licence. For this they expect to be able to "upgrade" to the current release of the software with out additional Baan costs.

Whilst the new software looks "nice", for some customers it lacks some of the IV_c modules and for most it does not provide a much extra functionality. There are nice features such as the improved data-model. For example item master is now five tables which should give some increase performance for high-end implementations. The GUI is more Bill-Gatesish and provides easy interface to MS-Office but this will not provide much increased efficiency or effectiveness (people still using ASCII interface can still point to much higher data-entry performance.)

All of the new features are just what a customers expect from a new software version. Customers expect to be able to upgrade without having an expensive project that need BoD approval. SSA need to provide the tools and education material that will permit this upgrade to be taken up by all back version, support paying customers. The most likely outcome for SSA if the do not grasp this opportunity is that customers will simply stop paying for the high cost support that they rarely need.

Terry

Don't know 'bout the rest of the world. But in the states SSA is in the middle of a group of road shows (going from town to town) showing off what LN, and some of the other SSA products can do for their customers.
They are free, so are the free webinars which i'm sure any SSA custoemr can attend.. and the global client forum... running ads in various trade magazines. I was surprised when I found and SSA ad in "DB2 Magazine"

Of course there's the ssa website which has tons of info as well...

What were you guys are looking for? I'm sort of a "bug 'em tell they tell me" sort of guy and even I haven't had to bug to hard..

Dave

I am glad to see there are someone who are positive on what SSA is doing. We just want them to do even better.

Most BaanIV customers who have been paying annual support fees have had little need for support over the period (up to 7 or 8 years by now) yet have paid a lot more in fees than the initial cost of their perpetual licence. For this they expect to be able to "upgrade" to the current release of the software with out additional Baan costs.

Whilst the new software looks "nice", for some customers it lacks some of the IV_c modules and for most it does not provide a much extra functionality. There are nice features such as the improved data-model. For example item master is now five tables which should give some increase performance for high-end implementations. The GUI is more Bill-Gatesish and provides easy interface to MS-Office but this will not provide much increased efficiency or effectiveness (people still using ASCII interface can still point to much higher data-entry performance.)

All of the new features are just what a customers expect from a new software version. Customers expect to be able to upgrade without having an expensive project that need BoD approval. SSA need to provide the tools and education material that will permit this upgrade to be taken up by all back version, support paying customers. The most likely outcome for SSA if the do not grasp this opportunity is that customers will simply stop paying for the high cost support that they rarely need.

Terry


Yes, you are very clear that why the customers don't migrate. The guy/team who designed the Baan 5a schema in the nineties created this trouble. It is not only a problem of tool. To migrate the system, you need some kind of consulting servie and this is the cost. You need to train your staff on the new version, re-coding your customization.

During the era of Invensys(OK, the poor Invensys), when you wanted to migrate BaanIV to BaanV, you have to give the service to the migration team in the Netherlands because they controlled the key of the migration tool. I hope this is changed now. If SSA can provide the migration tool and knowledge to the customers free of charge, it will help to reduce the cost of migration a lot.

We went live with LN on 1st Apr, to coincide with with our new financial year. and so far i am very impressed. admittedly we were not running a previous Baan version before LN.

There have been a small number of annoyances, parts of the software that should have certain functionallity but didnt. however SSA were rather good about this in that they paid for the Customizations needed rather than making us foot the bill.

After 3 months i must say i am very happy with the system. and would willingly recommend it to anyone. we chose ERP LN over SAP as it was a better fit to our requirments than SAP. as for flexibility LN is very good in this area, we are a food manufacturer (process as opposed to discreete) and LN copes with this perfectly however if your pharma-chem then LX will be a better fit

And now with WebTop v4 having been released things are getting better still

GeraintJones,

what was the functionality that was not supplied? I would appreciate it if you could elaborate a bit on that. You could save me and probably some others bad surprises. I'm currently putting a list of potential benefits and disadvantages of upgrading from Baan 4 to LN together for a customer. I've worked myself through 800 pages of documentation. It all sounds very impressive but my experience with Baan 5 when it first came out makes me a bit wary. Many things there didn't turn out to work the way it was first documented.

Karin

You can download a presentation that compares between BaanERP 5c and LN from this site:

http://bweb05.sba.com/upload/ssaglobalew/1/ERP-28.ppt

it was a really minor issue

heres the scenario :

we do no backorders at all, so all customers are set to ship line and cancel.

one of our order entry clerks would enter a sales order say 400 lines long, and we would be totaly out of stock of 3 of the lines, the order would be approved and all would seem well. however what would happen is the 3 lines would have stock allocated to them and would need to be canceled, the way we re it is ship line and cancel is supposed to cancel and short supplied lines so they do not get back ordered. this worked ok if someone odered 10 of product x and we only had 5. however if we had 0 then the order line would stay in the system with stock allocated to it.

however as i say SSA paid for and provided the fix for this, even though it was rejected by QA - SSA NZ also felt this was plain stupid

if you make to order or do contracting work this will not effect you, however if you make to stock and supply from an established stock listing it may

apart from that everything has been sweet!

Thanks for the explanation GeraintJones!

Karin