We are a BaaN IVc4 SP 18 installtion and I am looking to see if anyone has or has experience with a S&OP package which works with BaaN. The shop is make-to-order, but we want to automate and refine the process of maintaining and running the sales forcasting and budgeting process.

Currently, we use a bunch of spreadsheets dropped from BaaN via Cyberquery and then rekey the changed data when the salespeople have finished their work. To maintain data integrity, we load them into some custom sessions.

We are a BaaN IVc4 SP 18 installtion and I am looking to see if anyone has or has experience with a S&OP package which works with BaaN. The shop is make-to-order, but we want to automate and refine the process of maintaining and running the sales forcasting and budgeting process.

Currently, we use a bunch of spreadsheets dropped from BaaN via Cyberquery and then rekey the changed data when the salespeople have finished their work. To maintain data integrity, we load them into some custom sessions.

We are now evaluating a demand forecast software, to get it integrated with Baan. Let me know if you find a good S&OP software.

Given that we are not looking for a full blown S&OP package, I have found a potential solution in Steelwedge.com.

Interesting product, say they have experience with BaaN and they use SOAP to handle the flow back into BaaN. Nice thing about it, it has a workflow manager which pushes the process through the chain before updating the Baan tables.

Let me know your impressions.

Given that we are not looking for a full blown S&OP package, I have found a potential solution in Steelwedge.com.

Interesting product, say they have experience with BaaN and they use SOAP to handle the flow back into BaaN. Nice thing about it, it has a workflow manager which pushes the process through the chain before updating the Baan tables.

Let me know your impressions.
Yes, looks nice. But i guess the price is high since they target SAP customers. If the product supports SOAP, still need Baan Openworld Adapter for it to call.
Have u evaluated demandworks?

I had a demo with them - very nice product, but you are right. Holy cow!!! They have a very high opinion of themselves. $75,000 for the SW and another $120,000 in implementation. In hosted environment, it is $8000 per month!

I'll check the Demandworks product out.

FYI. Steelwedge talks about SAP, but they have BaaN experience. They describe it as ERP Agnostic.

Per a recommendation from the board, I took a look at the Demandworks package.

The software is platform agnostic. However, the data can be imported back to Baan via the Import/Export scripts. We have some customized sessions to handle budget and forecasting and to link revenue back to the contracts module.

That said, the product has a lot of the features of the more expensive packages. I really liked the simple interface, customizability and - if you don't have a DW - you can use their online OLAP tool which is a lot like a pivot table in Excel. It has a huristic model which will analyze the data and apply the correct analysis model to the data set. That is the calculated forecast. The user/planner can then override it with a final forecast.

Nice tool which the evaluation team then signed off on. So, maybe I'll be able to speak first hand.

Thanks for the tip.

Hi,
We are also evaluting Demand works for Forecasting. Its nice and is well within our budget. The interface seems to be easy to implement. We have inhouse resource, so interfacing in anyway is not issue for us. Let me know how you find this s/w. I also looked at Demand Solutions. But I like Demand works more.

Arvind