Baan has been dropped from Boeing site. Below is the story.
Boeing To Drop Baan's Software
(08/25/97; 3:00 p.m. EDT)
By Tom Stein, InformationWeek
Boeing is dropping Baan's enterprise resource planning software from its Corinth, Texas, operations. The decision, according to sources, is cost-related, though it may have more to do with Boeing's acquisition of McDonnell Douglas.
Baan confirmed last week that a scheduled 18-month pilot at the Corinth site, which makes parts for military applications, was scrapped after a month. Sources close to the situation say Boeing wasn't prepared to swallow the cost of completing the Baan installation -- estimated to be as high as $20 million. Another factor, according to the sources, was overruns with an earlier Baan implementation at Boeing's Irving, Texas, site. That implementation was supposed to cost $4.1 million and take about seven months. Instead, the sources say, it cost more than three times that amount and took three times as long to complete.
A Boeing representative says the Irving site does have Baan in production and that the Corinth decision was unrelated. The representative says Boeing ended the Corinth project because it's re-evaluating the best way to do business in the wake of its merger with McDonnell Douglas -- a major customer of Western Data Systems, a vendor of ERP software for the aerospace and defense industry.
Boeing has chosen the Calabasas, Calif., vendor for its Australian operations. Allan Wilson, senior VP of sales and marketing at Western Data, says the vendor is close to landing the Corinth deal. While Western Data claims that its software is better than Baan's for military-contract applications, a Baan representative insists the Corinth decision will not affect the rollout of Baan software at other Boeing sites.
Neither company would comment on how many Boeing sites use or plan to use Baan software. Still, Boeing isn't the only aerospace and defense company that has issues with Baan. Transfield Defense Systems, a defense contractor in Sydney, Australia, says it's a year behind schedule with its Baan implementation because the software's aerospace and defense functionality wasn't ready |
