BaaN/LN

Baan was a vendor of popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that is now owned by Infor Global Solutions.

The Baan Corporation was created by Jan Baan in 1978 in Barneveld, Netherlands, to provide financial and administrative consulting services. With the development of his first software package, Jan Baan and his brother Paul Baan entered what was to become the ERP industry. The Baan company focused on the creation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

Baan gained its popularity in the early nineties. It became a real threat to market leader SAP after beating SAP in the Boeing deal. However the management exaggerated the company revenue by booking software license selling to a related reseller. The revelation of this manipulation led to a sharp decline of Baan’s stock price.

In June 2000, facing worsening financial difficulties, law suits and reporting seven consecutive quarterly losses and bleak prospects, Baan was sold at a price of US$700 million to Invensys, a UK automation, controls, and process solutions group to become a unit of its Software and Services Division. Laurens van der Tang was the president of this unit. With the acquisition of Baan, Invensys’s CEO Allen Yurko had a vision to offer “Sensor to Boardroom” solution to customers.

In June 2003, after the stepping down of Allen Yurko, Invensys sold Baan unit to SSA Global Technologies for US$ 135 million. The main attempt was to reduce the high amount of debt of Invensys, and also because Invensys has no cash to inject to turnaround Baan.

Upon acquiring the Baan software, SSA renamed Baan as SSA ERP Ln. In August 2004, SSA Global released new version of Baan, SSA ERP LN 6.1. In May 2006, SSA was acquired by Infor Global Solutions of Atlanta, which was a major ERP consolidator in the market.

Baan is still one of the best ERP product for discrete manufacturing industries, especially for Make to Order and Engineering to order market. Nowadays, still thousands of manufacturers are running on Baan software, including Boeing, Ferrari, Solectron, Flextronics, Fiat, British_Aerospace (Now BAE Systems), Evenflo, Navistar.

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