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The Enterprise Modeler assists in developing a vision on:

• How to functionally structure an organization
• How to organize the business processes of the organization
• How to integrate the information system with these business processes

In addition, the Enterprise Modeler can also be used to assist in the actual implementation of the Baan applications by:

• Setting parameters in BaanERP.
• Creating BaanERP users, based on the role and employee data of the Enterprise Modeler.
• Creating the menus and session authorizations for users.

A reference model represents a line of business or business typology and can be built from libraries (repositories) of the following enterprise-modeler components:

• Business control diagrams
• Business function models
• Business process models
• Organization models

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Introduction

The development tools supplied by the BaanERP Tools package enable developers to program additional functionality for existing BaanERP applications or to build entirely new applications. The features provided by the development tools include:

• The BaanERP 3GL programming language.
• 4GL language features that enable you to add to or modify the default behaviour of sessions, reports, and the Data Access Layer.
• Baan SQL, which enables you to retrieve database data.
• Support for Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs).

3GL scripts are program scripts that are either linked to sessions without forms or not linked to sessions at all. They do not have any relationship with the 4GL Engine (previously known as the Standard Program). When creating such scripts, you must specify the entire program flow, including the main function. You cannot use 4GL event sections or functions.

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All of the application data used by BaanERP is stored in database tables in the underlying RDBMS. To keep the majority of the BaanERP processing independent of the RDBMS, BaanERP uses its own data dictionary. The data dictionary includes domain, schema, and referential integrity information that is stored in a database independent manner.

The BaanERP system provides a RDBMS interface, called 'database driver', to the major RDBMSs (Oracle, Informix, Sybase, DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server). The BaanERP database driver has a built-in mechanism for preserving referential integrity; it does not depend on the underlying RDBMS for maintaining referential integrity.

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BaanERP companies are defined by company number, name, currency, and a package combination that associates a specific database schema with the company.

Figure 1: Users and Developers:

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Complex application software systems, like ERP systems, are subject to continuous change. Both the discovery of programming errors and new technical as well as legal requirements call for modifications of the ERP system software. In addition, various parts of the standard software have to be customized for supporting country-, branch- and company-specific business processes. In order to be able to perform all these changes in a systematic way, different versions of software components (notably tables and sessions) can be maintained and configured into customized versions of a BaanERP system. Therefore, all components exist on a logical naming level and on the level of special instances or versions, like shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Version management in BaanERP:

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Both tables as well as application programs ('sessions') and their software components are assigned to modules grouping related business functions.

Figure 1: Packages, modules, sessions:

Packages

Business areas such as distribution, manufacturing, and finance are mapped into pro-gram packages that have a two character identification code, as listed in Table 1. The most important ones are: tc/Common, td/Distribution, ti/Manufacturing, and tf/Finance.

Table 1: BaanERP packages. The most important ones are emphasized.

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BaanERP supports a three-tier architecture consisting of a user interface tier, an application tier, and a database tier. The user interface tier provides presentation and input services for user interaction. The application tier consists of the BaanERP application server and the application programs. The database tier includes the BaanERP database driver and a third party RDBMS product that acts as the database server.

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Baan - The Company

• Founded: 1978
• Head quarter: Barneveld (The Netherlands) and Herndon (Virginia, USA)
• Customers: 13,000 customer sites worldwide (biggest customer: Boeing)
• Employees: approx. 4,700
• Revenues 1998: 736 Mio USD

Terminology

In Table 1, we list the most important terms where the Baan jargon departs from usual terminology.

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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are generic and comprehensive business software systems based on a distributed computing platform including one or more database management systems. They combine a global enterprise information system covering large parts of the information needs of an enterprise with a large number of application programs implementing all kinds of business processes that are vital for the operation of an enterprise.

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