BaaN IV V/s BaaN V

What is major difference within these two products? I have never worked on BaaN V.

On my opinion you can found major differences in distribution part.

In Baan IV there was only one package to manage distribution, warehousing and invoicing. Now you have 3 packages. These three packages are completly new.

Business partner and items management is very different too.

Manufacturing, service and finance are very near the Baan IV version.

Tools is almost identical (PMC was existing in baan IV). There is only some new stuff to manage versions and to install mods.

Entreprise modeling seems to be improved and multiple-companies management too...

I don't know about the configurator, project, connectivity.

Pierre.

There is alot of difference in the architecture between BaanIV and BaanERP. BaanERP is designed to be able to work with middleware products like Corba etc.

It is alot more performant as well and obviously from a user's point of view there is the much improved GUI. Compare it like this: BaanIV GUI is like Windows Notepad and BaanERP GUI is like MS Word. The comparision does not hold up a 100% but you get my drift :-)

Regarding Commandeur's comments: I think the Service module has greatly improved as well as one of our customer's sites specifically chose for BaanERP because of the TS module enhancements.

Regarding the PMC, this was initially created in BaanERP and then implemented (backported) in BaanIV.
There were some mistakes on the backporting and PMC in BaanIV is not working as it should be (less stable and buggy thabn PMC in BaanERP).

Does anybody know what improvements have been made in the td package?

Has planning been improved?

PJ

The changes in BaanERP can be divided in two parts, technical changes and functional changes.
On the technical side the major change is the Data Access Layer concept: This means that every table has a related source. This source gets triggered whenever you insert, modify or delete a record. The advantage of that is, that whenever a record is added changed or deleted through the bshell (not necessarily through a session) the program will run. This is an enormous advantage concerning the integration of other software. You can basically send a record of a foreign application (e.g. through Open World where the fields have to be mapped correctly of course) and there will be no more additional programming to get it into BaanERP. The DAL behaves similar to a COM object in the Microsoft world and emulates all user interaction.
Secondly a lot of fields have been enlarged in size. E.g. all document numbers (like order numbers, invoices, ...) have now 9 digits. That will prevent number overflows.

On the functional side we can mention the following:
-There is only one table for customer specific and standard items. The item code consists of two parts, a 9 digit project number and a 38 digit item number.
-Planning has been improved dramatically. MPS, MRP, DRP are now included in a single planning engine. Planning includes the CTP concept. Planning works with multi sourcing strategy.
-Service has been developed completely new.
-There is a new, enormously powerful configuration engine.
-The item master has been separated into 9 tables.
-INV and ILC have been united in warehousing. For every material movement a separate document, a warehousing order is created.

There is much more to mention, but these are the major things.

Regards,

Markus

The td package no longer exists. Basically there is now Order Management, Warehousing and Central Invoicing.

Order Management is Sales/Purchasing etc
Warehousing is your Location/Inventory Control section
And central Invoicing is where all invoicing is done regardless of where the order is created

Finance is basically the same, but Financial Integration has grown dramatically

Baan TEXAS (http://communities.msn.com/BaanTX)

I have found that the biggest logistic difference was in the Planning modules. MRP/MPS are not even terms used. Everything is not OrderBased or MasterBased planning.
Our msn community groups have posted several documents on the differences. Includes some screencams of how it works.

http://communities.msn.com/BaanTX

http://communities.msn.com/Baan5

I would load them here but our size is limited. We can load 1meg files at our user communities above.

Clark

Contrary to earlier rumour, the Service package in Baan V is a complete rewrite, and can happily handle field and internal maintenance. Put it together with E-Service, E-Service Remote, Service Scheduler etc., and its a great product, unlike the wimpy module in Baan IV.

DEM also is very different, more powerful and at the same time far easier to administer (OK - there are more things to remember, but changes are now pretty painless).