The Company
Kistler offers a comprehensive range of sensors and
systems for engine development, automotive
engineering, plastics and metal processing, installation
technology and biomechanics.
The Exercise
Kistler has four independent Baan Systems in Switzerland, USA, Japan and Germany.
The IT departments perform several tasks with Baan report programming, according to
users’ requests. In addition, they hire external programmers who help greatly. However,
they had to spend large amounts of money to achieve these solutions.
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During the difficult economics in the year 2009, the IT department had to cut in
expenses. While they had used NAZDAQ’s B2Win for years before, they only used it to
create simple Excel sheets, especially in the finance department and IT.
According to Martin Cajoos, Head of Corporate IT, “I must admit that we never read the
documentation clearly and we were happy when the printout ended with an Excel. Then
I attended a NAZDAQ Webinar where Baan Query Tool (BQT) was explained, and
during this Webinar I recognized that B2Win is much stronger than expected. We
discovered how to pre-format Excels, apply Formulas, integrate Excel-Grouping, and
use templates. I did also not know about floating header before.”
The Solution
Kistler is using B2Win now in almost all departments, in order to put Baan reports into
Excel. Baan Query Tool (BQT) is used mostly in IT to create fast and easy reports. In
addition, they have a new project where they have to gather data together from all the
Baan systems and consolidate it. BQT has been a great help because they can take out
every data they want. BQT runs fast, even with more complex multi-table queries.
Since they also have to perform large data cleanup, they can simply extract data into
Excel. The users can modify the data in Excel and they can import it back using
Exchange. According to Mr. Cajoos, “This technique saves man-weeks of work ,
because the users do not have to go through many Baan sessions, record by record. “
The Result
With all these capabilities in B2Win, Kistler IT personal in the USA, Japan and Germany are
now able to change/format reports without hiring external consultants.
Last weeks, as an example, they had to create a report showing the sales of a group of
items, compare the sales price with the internal cost price, and bring all of them into
Excel. With the BQT function “wide report” and “B2Win” as an output device, it was
done in less than 15 minutes!
We asked Mr. Cajoos that based on their prior experience, how did they find the
support given to them by NAZDAQ?
“NAZDAQ has excellent support. If in case of a question or a problem, an e-mail
response from NAZDAQ reaches us mostly in less than one hour, during our working
hours. The solution they would provide will solve our problems in most cases. If we
have ideas on how to improve the software, NAZDAQ listens to us and tries to find a
solution in a new release of the software. One of the problems we had with Baan
reports in general and Baan Query Tool, in particular, is that these reports are limited to
255 chars per line. In order to overcome this limitation, a new feature was added to BQT
(wide reports) that when used would not put any limit on the width of the report”.
We also asked what they think about NAZDAQ solutions in relation to its pricing.
“If I compare our savings in time and external consulting efforts against the moderate
pricing from NAZDAQ, it is really worth to use the tools from NAZDAQ.”