BAE is making no attempt to unify ERP across the whole of BAE Systems. Civil aviation, maritime and land defence manufacturing run both SAP and Oracle. BAE Systems ERP landscape has grown through mergers of business units making quite dissimilar products.
BAE currently manufacturers a wide variety of products such as ammunition, aircraft, assault vehicles and submarines.
According to The nature of each company within BAE, as well as the legacy applications complete unification makes such a project undesirable says John Booth – head of the project.
The solution will be applied across the BAE Systems Military Air organisation, including on programmes such as Typhoon, Hawk and F-35 Lightning II.
Computerweekly.com recently outlined how BAE Systems Military Air and Information (MAI) is planning a systems renewal and has filled less than half the positions with IT people. MAI is part of aerospace, defence and security within BAE Systems. The project is currently in the design phase. The objective is the unification of the seven disparate ERP systems currently in use.
After an RFI process, BAE selected Infor to conduct a request for proposal exercise. BAE Systems MAI was already using Baan ERP systems, so Infor, which acquired Baan, was the selected supplier partly because of a shared history. BAE Systems has selected Infor LN as the central ERP system, as well as Infor EAM for asset management and Infor Warehouse Mobility. Analysis and reporting will be handled by Infor BI and Infor Enterprise Performance Management. The applications will be integrated using Infor ION.
The project team includes members from CSC and Infor.
CSC has a long relationship with BAE and was also involved in the integration of Global Combat Systems (GCS) in the UK and the Swedish Vehicles business on SAP.
Roll-out will be staggered through business units from 2014 and is expected to be complete in 2015 at a cost of tens of millions of pounds.
In other news, BAE Systems has been hit by the budgetary shutdown in the US. The company said that some 1,200 of its 35,000 US staff had already been told not to turn up for work.
The military jet division is also suffering from delays on some major contracts. BAE is confident of resolving the “Salam” contract with Saudi Arabia for 72 Eurofighters, but wrangling over pricing continues just as does the wait for the workers at BAE Systems’ Weapons Teams in Barrow.
The Barrow employees expect to be told on Thursday what the future holds as longstanding talks for an order of 145 M777 guns from the Indian government have stalled. So far no order has been placed for the guns and work at the plant has dried up.
In August it was also reported that the Serious Fraud Office admitted it had lost 32,000 pages of documents related to its now closed investigation in BAE Systems’ £43bn al-Yamamah arms deal. The probe ended in 2010 after the British defence giant agree to pay almost £300m in the US and the UK to settle long-running corruption claims.
Read more on the project at Infor’s press release
