Baan CRM, Meet Baan SCM

Steve Carpenter had barely warmed the president seat at the Baan CRM business unit before a new president was appointed the top spot last week. Ed Daihl, a three-year Baan veteran, who is also president of the Baan Supply Chain Management business unit, is taking hold of the CRM reigns effective immediately. The announcement was made last week at the Baan World Users conference at The Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. Daihl will be responsible for all aspects of the CRM business unit, whereas Carpenter, who served approximately six months as the president of Baan CRM, was appointed the position of vice president of Baan Enterprises, Baan's largest software division--with a staff of more than 900--and will help run all of the software development for that division. This is a jump from the approximately 260 employees in the CRM business unit, Daihl adds. The organizational restructuring illustrates Baan's intention to meld SCM and CRM efforts. "Baan's move to combine SCM and CRM shows that they are once again ahead of the curve in understanding where the industry is heading," Sharon Ward, formerly vice president of Enterprise Applications at Hurwitz Group, said in a statement. Daihl says Baan executives are seeing a lot of room for synergy between CRM and supply chain management. He cites an example where CRM meets SCM: "We can take orders over the Internet, configure and price it, then tie that into our supply chain software that does advanced planning and scheduling and actually do the availability to promise. To do that all online and almost real-time is really a competitive advantage. Then, to be able to ship that complex configuration and pricing into the ERP system and get it built as configured and offer it not only to direct sales force but to your channel partners is really where I see us going forward. That is a combination of products that have traditionally been in the CRM space that have also been in the supply chain space." Among SCM and CRM customers, Daihl says, there is a shared concern for return on investment. "I'm seeing what I call 'two and two.' If you have the ability to sell a solution, implement it in two months, and see an ROI in two quarters, then customers will buy that -- particularly, in the supply chain and the CRM space," Daihl says. At the BWU conference, Baan also announced an enhanced focus on the supplier relationship management (SRM) market with the release of iBaan Sourcing and enhancements to its iBaan E-Procurement solutions. The SRM announcements enable businesses to plan commodity, procurement, and supplier management strategies; source raw materials, components, goods, services, and capital equipment; and analyze spend and supply base as well as their product lifecycle and production needs. Moving forward, Daihl expects to see some more SRM activity coming from Baan. "I've had responsibility for the SRM space with our e-procurement and e-sourcing and I'm looking for synergies in the technology base between those products and the CRM products as well." Separately, Baan also announced announced its iBaan Value Apps strategy and OpenWorldX, a new enabling platform for the creation and deployment of business process solutions. OpenWorldX is designed to reduce the time and effort required to configure and deploy iBaan solutions. iBaan Value Apps leverage OpenWorldX to focus on a business process and engage only the specific software components needed to deliver the solution. Examples of planned iBaan Value Apps include supplier collaboration, configuration and commitment, and engineering design collaboration. The first iBaan Value Apps will be available shortly after the first shipments of OpenWorldX. Baan will deliver its iBaan Value Apps through an enhanced solution delivery organization as well as its alliance network.