Diagnostic software identifies problem roots

Novel diagnostic application enables structured and repeatable analysis of business data to help organisations identify root causes of operational problems.

Baan, the leading enterprise application provider for industrial enterprises and part of Invensys plc, is to launch its major new iBaan Diagnostic Analyzer tool at this year's CeBIT event.

The new iBaan Diagnostic Analyzer enables customers to perform structured and repeatable analysis of business data to help them identify the most likely causes of a particular operational problem.

This can help organisations focus on addressing the key aspects that can have the most impact on Return on Capital Employed and business performance, and can help them prioritise their investments for continued improvement.

At CeBIT 2003, Baan will also unveil a new version of its iBaan Decision Manager information solution.

iBaan Decision Manager 2.2 uses a powerful data warehouse infrastructure to enable businesses to optimise their reporting and analysis processes, providing executives with the information they need to help them make the most competitive, profitable decision.

These new solutions are key parts of Baan's major 'Measure Up!' initiative.

'Measure Up!' is aimed at helping discrete manufacturers in Baan's core markets of Aerospace and Defence, Electronics, Automotive, and Industrial Machinery and Equipment to measure, monitor, analyse and manage business processes to optimise enterprise-wide business performance.

Dave Wangler, senior vice president of marketing, Baan commented: "'Measure Up!' focuses on core performance measures such as demand forecast accuracy, lead-time reduction, and new product introduction.

This focus enables organisations to establish objective baselines, determine where opportunities lie and 'measure up' against these critical areas in order to improve Return on Capital Employed, prioritise investment, and establish continuous monitoring improvement initiatives.

"The addition of these new information solutions will provide the tools and metrics that can help manufacturing organisations make key decisions that drive their business performance improvement strategies," added Dave Wangler.

The iBaan Diagnostic Analyzer solution is the industry's first diagnostic tool to offer structured searching for the causes of operational problems.

This can help managers with their decision-making processes by determining the areas of focus for their business performance improvement strategies.

iBaan Diagnostic Analyzer uses predefined search models to reflect the business processes that played a (possible) role in the operational problem.

By executing a search model, the user can source a weighted list of to-the-point conclusions that can directly aid the decision-making process.

iBaan Decision Manager 2.2 offers a powerful data warehouse infrastructure to translate complex transactional data from various sources into more consistent, easy-to-use business information.

iBaan Decision Manager enables businesses to further optimise their multi-dimensional data reporting and analysis processes, helping them take fuller 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.

"The basic premise of 'Measure Up!' is 'diagnose before you prescribe'," explains Ernie Eichenbaum, VP global industry marketing, Baan.

"The unique combination of iBaan Decision Manager with iBaan Diagnostic Analyzer provides many companies with a first time opportunity to clearly connect between balance sheet numbers and operational causes that impact them.

By creating this cause and effect connection capability, managers can better attack the real problems, while objectively measuring results.

This can help them to unlock new value from existing IT investments." Overtoom is one of Europe's leading office supplies, products and services providers and a major user of Baan's information solutions.

Bilbo Schreiner, business intelligence manager at Overtoom explains how iBaan is helping to support his company's business performance improvement strategies: "We were looking to further leverage the business data produced by our existing ERP system.

Through detailed analysis of this data, our aim was to achieve a level of performance measurement that would drive our planning processes.

With the deployment of the iBaan tools, we can now source high level performance indicators that were just not available to us before.

These metrics have helped to provide us with better control of our business and to plan for improved productivity, greater efficiency and broader visibility of inventory levels." Bio-Rad Laboratories is a multinational manufacturer and distributor of life science research products and clinical diagnostics.

Explaining how Baan has helped Bio-Rad gain cross-enterprise visibility, Tom Lucas, manager business systems development at Bio-Rad commented: "In the rapidly evolving bio technology industry, informed decision making can make the difference between success and failure.

To enable us to respond quickly and decisively to changes in our business, we needed tools that could help us to analyse key business metrics such as sales trends, on-time delivery performance, and inventory accuracy and turnover rates.

The iBaan solutions have enabled us to leverage the opportunity to measure up, giving us better insights into operational performance worldwide and leading to faster and more accurate decision making and enhanced competitiveness." "The drive for risk and opportunity management has resurrected the need to embed financial processes and discipline (integrated analytics) into seamless business workflows," said META Group research analyst, Aaron Zornes.

"Through 2003/04, businesses will be challenged to embrace the dynamism essential to survive in the fast-paced global economy - which in turn will drive the need to integrate financial processes throughout the enterprise, and thereby to link business strategy to operations." iBaan Decision Manager 2.2 and iBaan Diagnostic Analyzer form part of the new OpenWorldX information solutions family, planned to be available as early as summer 2003.

About Baan - Baan helps industrial enterprises optimise their enterprise performance strategies and compete in the knowledge-driven 'networked economy', with its ever-increasing demands for information, integration, and collaboration.

Through its open and powerful iBaan suite of Internet-enabled solutions, Baan is ideally placed to support organisations in the manufacturing, logistics, services, and engineering industries as they move towards tighter integration of their complex processes, closer collaboration throughout their value chain, and greater accessibility of cross-enterprise transactional and analytical information.

Baan has more than 15,000 customer sites worldwide and is part of the Production Management division of Invensys PLC.

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