ULMA Construction: It's absolutely a mandatory Add-On to Baan

There are 25 people in the IT area, divided into System Networking & Communication, Application & Development, and Organization & Support. The Baan team within the IT department has eight analysts/programmers.

We are running Baan IVc4 SP7 for application and SPT20 for Tools. We have 3 live servers and 1 test server. We have 267 user licenses for more than 1,000 Baan users — we have users in several time zones so it's easy to share the license between all servers.

Spanish Baan implementation started in 1997. The special feature about our implementation was that Baan doesn't cover Rental, so we had to do huge customization. We implemented Logistics, Manufacturing, Commercial, and Finance with deep customizations in all of them but Finance. We'd love to upgrade to Infor ERP Ln but we are facing the international deployment of Baan and have no time to analyze the upgrade of our functionality.

Baan Color Changer — mainly used in Headquarters because our local users must work with 37 live Baan companies. It helps minimize or avoid mistakes when working with different companies and/or servers.

Baan Hot Link — used in the Spanish server, soon to be deployed to international servers. About 50 mappings have been created. Users can access customers' or providers' scanned documentation from a Baan session with one click.

B2Win — widely used. Probably the most popular NAZDAQ tool in our company. About 250 reports in several languages are configured with this tool. Excel and Acrobat outputs are commonly used.

B2Email Plus / Standard — Plus is mainly used in Headquarters; Standard is used in other servers for internal notifications. In Spain we combine B2Email Plus with an Internet Fax provider (Vodafone) to replace traditional fax machines and fax servers.

We had to customize several reports to set up appropriate layouts for opening from Excel. We had absolutely no relation between Baan data and external documents. We used fax machines extensively.

We first met NAZDAQ during our Baan deployment in Portugal. A Portuguese Baan consultant showed us the product and we could see how easy it was to format Baan reports in a friendlier look — that's how we first met B2Win. Other NAZDAQ tools came after, and we fell in love with Baan Hot Link. It doesn't matter where you keep your documents — we even open documents stored in MS SharePoint Server.

Thanks to B2Win, we stopped customizing reports for our users. We taught key users to customize their reports and now they are responsible for setting them up for the rest of the users. Small customizations like hiding a column or sorting data differently are a waste of time and a big effort for an already overloaded IT department.

Our users are happier each day with these tools. Our most advanced users are exploring NAZDAQ's possibilities every day, and from the IT department we are analyzing the new features of B2Win and B2Email versions to improve internal processes.

We have no words to explain it. Working with a provider so far away brings no difficulties — it's a successful long-distance relation. They seem permanently connected to their mail; an SOS message is answered very quickly despite the time difference.

It's a very profitable investment. We think it should be mandatory to buy these tools when acquiring Baan. They are absolutely a mandatory Add-On to Baan.

Ability to upgrade to new versions at no cost.

High-quality support for any unexpected problem with the tools — the response is always fast, no matter how difficult the situation.