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Tuesday 16th November 2004 Stratford Manor Hotel Conference Presentations and Committee Reviews Available in the Download Archive Should any user wish to submit additional or supplementary questions via the user group please submit them to the office - email office@baanusers.co.uk Baan UK & Ireland User Group questions and answers - Nov 2004 Conference Q1 Have we a definitive list of partners available to the UK users?
Please note partnership agreements are subject to change. Q2 Do they all have access to the source code and are authorised to amend it? No, not all partners have authorised access – see above. Q3 If not, could you indicate the ones who do have authorised access? See Q1. Q4 Is there a list of outstanding issues with 4c4 and are they all being carried through to LN? One Point Support has a log of all issues with Baan IVC4, and as these issues are fixed in IVC4, they will also be fixed in SSA ERP LN, if they still exist in the latest version. Q5 What is the criteria for "suitable business case" for enhancement requests to be approved for earlier versions that LN? Normally enhancement requests are applied to the latest version of the software. It is hard to state specific criteria, but by providing a "suitable business case" for making changes to an earlier version than LN, we mean that the case should include good reasons for applying the enhancement to the earlier version. For example, the case might relate to compliance with legal fiscal reporting, or with some industry regulatory body's requirements where the earlier version is non-compliant. In addition the complexity of the change will be considered; in many cases it is impractical to make the change in an earlier version. LN specific Q6 Where will users be able to access a copy of the LN migration document? The external documentation is currently with Solutions marketing for review. Once this is available, it can be requested through account managers. Alternatively individual client migration assessments can be carried out through professional services. Q7 Is there a listing within the migration document of the technical and functional difficulties already experienced when migrating and is this being updated on an ongoing basis? As above. Q8 Have you a complete listing of the demonstrations available to allow members to determine what they would wish to see demonstrated? We are happy to demonstrate all of the capabilities of LN and extension products. If there is specific interest due to a project either proposed or underway, the customer should talk to their account manager to arrange. If the interest is general we would be very happy to know what these areas are and we will schedule open seminars to accommodate everyone. Q9 Have you a demo facility to allow the detailed evaluation of LN for users at their own premises? We would welcome anyone who wishes to take advantage of their OPS to take and install a version of LN for their own evaluation/upgrade planning purposes and would assist them in that process. Please make requests through account manager and Presales. Q10. Has LN lost any functionality previously available in earlier versions of Baan? A new module has been added to ERP LN for Freight Management. The focus of this module however is a bit different compared to the transportation module in Baan IV. Freight Management provide support for shippers (manufacturing) with a need to consolidate loads and shipments and manage transportation and invoicing based on the commitment in the sales order and does this much better then Baan IV. Freight management does not have a focus on 3PLs where Baan IV had some basic functionality to support those companies. The Baan IVc4 extensions like Automotive, A&D and Cable & Dimensions are, but also the functionality for process is currently not available on ERP LN. Besides, some concepts changed which resulted in some differences in implementation of ERP LN compared to Baan IV. Q11 What are the issues relating to user customisations when upgrading and the support implications of these in the future? At this stage, the tools offer very limited support for migrating customisations. Our advice is to determine whether such customizations continue to be required in the business. Work is underway on a project to build tools that further ease migration of customizations into the new SSA ERPLN environment. Q12. Our information is that COGNOS is the standard Reporting Tool set in LN, is this correct? SSA CPM is one of the strategic solutions from SSA Global; SSA CPM is based on tools and technology from Cognos. SSA Global brings value to this solution through integrations and pre-defined business content. The strategic partnership between SSA Global and Cognos will benefit customers through rapid time to solution implementation and offers the customer the option of deploying a complete CPM solution on a single vendor architecture. SSA Global recognizes that customers may have made a choice for reporting and analysis tools other than from Cognos. In this respect SSA Enterprise Analytics provides a complementary solution to the challenge of building and maintaining SSA ERP related data marts or a data warehouse. SSA Global retains the option to sell and support the former Crystal Decisions products. The connection between Crystal Reports and SSA ERP ln (Baan ERP) will also be maintained (*) . This is to provide existing customers with continuity and protection of their investments to date. An equivalent connection, and business content, will be developed for ReportNet as part of a complete Enterprise Reporting solution. Q13. What are the implications, both technical and cost, if users wish to continue to use Report tools such as Crystal or Safari? ===================== At the moment SSA Global is jointly working with Business Objects to link SSA ERP LN to version 11 of the Business Objects new release of BusinessObjects 11, the successor of Crystal Enterpirse Professional version 10. Crystal is a partner for the ERP LN solution and is currently planning to support the report tools. SSA Global will support users on their current releases. We did not provide "Value Add's" to Safari's-application, and see also "CPM-comments" above. Q14 How do you propose to provide a cost model to our users to establish budget cost for migration, customisation, training and an additional toolsets that may have to be purchased? This is addressed on a case-by-case basis. Please contact your account manager who will be happy to assist you. Q15 Have SSA come up with a plan to allow users of the 4C4 "Process" module to upgrade to LN, which I understand at this moment does not include any of the process functionality (in our case this mainly means co-product completions of multiple items from one production batch)? - Question raised by Texon International. The migration tooling is very flexible and can support this kind of migration. However, as pointed out, little (if any) of the process extension functionality is contained within SSA ERP LN and hence some evaluation of where data would reside and how new processes would be implemented would be an important part of an upgrade project. Q16 Has LN lost any functionality previously available in earlier versions of Baan? A new module has been added to ERP LN for Freight Management. The focus of this module however is a bit different compared to the transportation module in Baan IV. Freight Management provide support for shippers (manufacturing) with a need to consolidate loads and shipments and manage transportation and invoicing based on the commitment in the sales order and does this much better then Baan IV. Freight management does not have a focus on 3PLs where Baan IV had some basic functionality to support those companies. The Baan 4C4 extensions like Automotive, A&D and Cable & Dimensions are, but also the functionality for process is currently not available on ERP LN. Besides, some concepts changed which resulted in some differences in implementation of ERP LN compared to Baan IV. Q17 Our information is that COGNOS is the standard Reporting Tool set in LN, is this correct? SSA CPM is one of the strategic solutions from SSA Global; SSA CPM is based on tools and technology from Cognos. SSA Global brings value to this solution through integrations and pre-defined business content. The strategic partnership between SSA Global and Cognos will benefit customers through rapid time to solution implementation and offers the customer the option of deploying a complete CPM solution on a single vendor architecture. The solution strategy for SSA CPM is to integrate it with other strategic solutions and the majority of its core ERP solutions. SSA CPM integrations will become available for SSA Baan IV from September 2004 onwards and for SSA ERP ln from early 2005. To protect customer investments, SSA Global will continue to support SSA DM (formerly iBaan DM) and make development investments to ensure that SSA DM remains a robust and viable solution for a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse platform. SSA DM can be combined with the Cognos product components of SSA CPM such as ReportNet and PowerPlay for reporting and analysis respectively. SSA Global recognizes that customers may have made a choice for reporting and analysis tools other than from Cognos. In this respect SSA Enterprise Analytics provides a complementary solution to the challenge of building and maintaining SSA ERP related data marts or a data warehouse. SSA Global retains the option to sell and support the former Crystal Decisions products. The connection between Crystal Reports and SSA ERP in (Baan ERP) will also be maintained*. This is to provide existing customers with continuity and protection of their investments to date. An equivalent connection, and business content, will be developed for ReportNet as part of a complete Enterprise Reporting solution. Q18 What are the implications, both technical and cost, if users wish to continue to use Report tools such as Crystal or Safari? *SSA Global supports the integration between Crystal Enterprise Professional 10 and Baan 4C4, Baan ERP 5.0c and Baan ERP 5.2a via the Crystal Enterprise Solution Kit for Baan version 10. The latter is the software application that establishes the database connection to the ERP databases for operational reporting. At the moment SSA Global is jointly working with Business Objects to link SSA ERP LN to version 11 of the Business Objects new release of Business Objects 11, the successor of Crystal Enterprise Professional version 10. Crystal is a partner for the ERP LN solution and is currently planning to support the report tools. SSA Global will support users on their current releases. We did not provide "Value Add's" to Safari's-application, and see also "CPM-comments" above. | |||||||||||||
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