Baan Extends iBaan Business Intelligence Suite

Baan, the global provider of B2B collaborative commerce solutions, has announced a new version of its iBaan Decision Manager tactical business intelligence solution to further extend its iBaan Business Intelligence Suite. iBaan Decision Manager 2.1 will provide manufacturing organisations with a powerful Internet-enabled decision management solution based on incremental, easy-to-use business content templates and a dedicated Business Information Warehouse. This will enable businesses to further optimise their multi-dimensional data reporting and analysis processes, helping them to take full advantage of the hidden intelligence and trends locked in their transactional databases, and strengthening support for the enterprise-wide tactical decision-making that is increasingly important in the new generation of collaborative commerce environments.

iBaan Decision Manager 2.1 adds value to ordinary transactional data by transforming it into actionable, intelligent business information. It offers a powerful data warehouse infrastructure to translate complex transactional data from various sources into consistent, easy-to-use business information. This enables reporting and analysis by vendor ratings, sales performance, project monitoring, resource utilisation analysis or inventory movement. iBaan Decision Manager 2.1 is available today with out-of-the-box business templates for core iBaan and e-procurement applications. Additional templates are under development and will be rolled-out on an ongoing, incremental basis. For each area of analysis, the business templates define what data is extracted from the source system, and how Decision Manager presents the data for further analyses.

Major users of the iBaan Business Intelligence Suite include KPN, Overtoom, and Puratos. Overtoom is a leading European industrial equipment wholesaler and Olivier Serruys, Director of Overtoom International Benelux, based in Belgium, believes the iBaan Business Intelligence Suite provides real control for his business: "We looked at a number of solutions when we came to choose our BIS application, and we selected Baan because its analytical and reporting capabilities went beyond a marketing vision to offer real, deliverable benefits. With the iBaan Business Intelligence Suite, we shall know exactly what our company is doing at any given moment, and we can work with this information to identify, localise and eliminate bottlenecks."

iBaan Decision Manager 2.1 consists of two components - the ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) Modeler and the Decision Manager Console. The Decision Manager Console supports system administration and management functions for the Business Information Warehouse by scheduling and monitoring various processes, generating metadata reports, maintaining OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cubes, checking data quality and cleaning the data warehouse. The ETL Modeler enables easy modelling of extraction transformation and loading scripts which are generated automatically from a user-defined model. The ETL Modeler offers advanced data warehousing functionality including selecting tables and fields from various data-sources, defining transformations on raw data from the data sources, and defining the upload strategy to load the transformed data into a data warehouse.

With the ETL Modeler, no hands-on attention to the technical details of script implementation is required from the user during ETL Model design. The business content templates are also developed with the ETL Modeler. These templates can be customised or new templates can be developed.

iBaan is the only Web-based solution to address manufacturers' growing demands for tighter integration and full visibility across their entire supply chains. The suite combines proven Baan technology with significant new developments that enable customers to take significant steps towards seamlessly integrating systems and processes, providing end-users with personalised and easy-to-use information, and empowering businesses to collaborate with their customers and suppliers over the Internet.

About Baan:
Baan helps companies to compete in the 'networked economy' with its ever-increasing demands for more information, integration and collaboration. Through its powerful new iBaan suite of Internet-enabled solutions, Baan is ideally placed to support organisations in the manufacturing, logistics, service and engineering industries as they move towards tighter integration of their complex processes, closer collaboration with customers and partners, and providing employees with build-to-order shop floor data and supply information. Baan has more than 15,000 customer sites worldwide, and is part of the Invensys Software Systems Division - a global leader in the provision of e-business/automation solutions.

For more information, please visit http://www.baan.com

About Invensys plc:
Invensys is a global leader in the Automation and Controls industry. With its head office in London, England it operates in all regions of the world through four focused divisions – Software Systems, Automation Systems, Power Systems and Control Systems. With over 80,000 employees, the company’s products and services range from advanced control systems and networks for automating industrial plants and controlling the environments of buildings, to electronic devices and controls found in residential buildings and light commercial applications, plus complete power systems for the telecommunications and information technology industries.

For more information, please contact:

Alex Bell, IBA
PR for Baan
Tel: + 44 1780 721433
abell@iba-europe.com