Kistler utilizes B2Win and BQT from NAZDAQ to clean data in their Baan systems

Kistler offers a comprehensive range of sensors and systems for engine development, automotive engineering, plastics and metal processing, installation technology and biomechanics.

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, and hire external programmers — but had to spend large amounts of money to achieve these solutions. During the difficult economy in 2009, the IT department had to cut expenses. While they had used B2Win for years, they only used it for simple Excel sheets in finance and IT.

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 Excel reports, apply formulas, integrate Excel grouping, and use templates. I also did not know about floating headers before.

Kistler now uses B2Win in almost all departments to put Baan reports into Excel. BQT is used mostly in IT to create fast and easy reports. We also have a project to gather data from all the Baan systems and consolidate it — BQT runs fast, even with complex multi-table queries. For large data cleanup we extract data into Excel, modify it, and import it back using Exchange. This technique saves man-weeks of work because users don't have to go through many Baan sessions, record by record.

With these capabilities in B2Win, Kistler IT personnel in the USA, Japan and Germany can now change/format reports without hiring external consultants. As an example, recently 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 it all into Excel — using BQT's wide-report function and B2Win as an output device, it was done in less than 15 minutes!

NAZDAQ has excellent support. In case of a question or problem, an email response from NAZDAQ reaches us mostly in less than one hour during our working hours, and the solution they provide solves our problems in most cases. If we have ideas to improve the software, NAZDAQ listens and tries to find a solution in a new release. For example, BQT used to be limited to 255 chars per line; the wide-reports feature was added to overcome that limitation.

If I compare our savings in time and external consulting effort against the moderate pricing from NAZDAQ, it is really worth using the tools from NAZDAQ.