"As Baan users, your staff will already be familiar with the function of Baan's standard display, maintain, processing
and reporting sessions. With the day to day use of Baan and the specific requirements of your organisation, many
people will have noticed functionality that they would prefer could be altered and others will have ideas as to how
forms could be changed to suit their method of working to increase efficiency and productivity. Brookdale can offer
a full, client-specific, customisation service incorporating customisation tracking and patch management."
Brookdale Technical Services Limited has many years' experience of taking standard Triton and
Baan sessions and tailoring them to suit individual clients' specific requirements. Baan sessions are generally built
to have one of four basic data-handling functions -
Display
Print
Maintain
Process
Any of these sessions can be altered in appearance or function, though of course some
changes are more fundamental than others. Read more about session types and just some of the customisation options
available:
(View Brookdale's Customisation Philosophy)
Display Sessions
Above is shown a standard Baan Display session
Changing the way in which Baan's data is displayed is the simplest form of customisation, in that the only
required changes are to the session forms, as long as the required data resides in the main table of the session.
Any
other data can also be retrieved for display, however, by program script changes. This is particularly useful where it
is desired to display, for instance, a description field held in another table, so that a second session doesn't have
to be opened to view the remaining required data. Bringing data together so that it is visible on one form is a simple
change to make yet can potentially increase productivity dramatically.
Print sessions, that generate Baan reports, are the method by which data can best be extracted from
the database and displayed as per the user's parameters. Shown above is the form of a session that has been modified to
focus the search for data by an effective date range. A change is also required in the way in which the session's program
script selects the data - irrelevant data is filtered out of the search by date and reduces the time taken to retrieve
the information. This example shows how a simple customisation can add greater relevance to output and reduce
the amount of paperwork generated.
There is almost endless scope for altering standard report layouts - examples being moving the position of existing fields,
adding new fields, summarising or detailing data and altering layouts to suit pre-printed stationery.
Much more complex changes can also be made to select alternative reports, to differentiate data between reports,
to select data from other parts of the database or to generate output files that can be exported to such applications
as Microsoft Excel.
Above is shown a standard Baan Maintain session.
Customisations made to these sessions can range from adding a display field to the form, to making a change to
the session's main table. In the latter case, such an example might be adding a data field to the table and adding
an input-type field to the form to allow maintenance of the data within it. This provides a method of storing unique
data, perhaps relevant only to your organisation.
Links can also be added via the 'specific' menu to other, related sessions to enable easier navigation. This is
applicable to all session types as it only requires form modifications.
Making changes to maintain type sessions is less common than other types of customisation, but can offer great
flexibility and business-specific advantages, in allowing unique data fields to be maintained.
Above is shown a standard Baan Process session.
Processing sessions are typically the most complex of Baan sessions - they update your database with processed data
and ensure that integrity is maintained. For this reason, it is generally not advisable to customise Baan's
standard functionality. However, where changes have been made to perhaps add new tables or fields, code can be added
to ensure processing of the new data in line with standard database changes. This allows you to have customised
data fields that are fully integrated with Baan's processing. Furthermore, where new development is taking place,
creating new processing sessions offers an opportunity to make functionality much more dynamic - see the
Development page for more details on how new sessions can enhance your business.
Customisation Services