Baan Builds Brand in Rome

Baan is planning its first inForum international event in Rome, Italy on April 17-19. The event is primarily for customers, partners, and analysts to hear from industry pundits and attend breakout sessions with Baan executives and sponsors. The event will act as a launching pad for several products and developments in product lifecycle management, supply chain and logistics management, and cross-enterprise analytics and reporting. The event is also an attempt to step up Baan's branding measures after a period of reticence. Explaining why the company has been so quiet over the past year, Susan Heystee, president of Baan Americas, says after Invensys acquired Baan the combined company needed to focus on growth. "We needed to go out and talk to customers to find out where we needed to improve our support. The result of that is customer satisfaction rating is at an all time high of 88 percent with mission critical systems. That's up 40 percent from one year prior," says Heystee. "As a result, we didn't do a lot of public relations. We needed to get our house in order. We worked on a number of new releases and focused on building the business back" The company's restructuring efforts appear to be paying off. "Moving forward, we see a good opportunity to grow the business. We have 200 recent customer wins over the last nine months. We're pleased with that and we're pleased with where the company is today from a customer stand point with six thousand customers worldwide." Baan is a subsidiary of the Invensys Software Systems division of Invensys plc.