The Baan Company announced its new component-based business solution in Paris yesterday. British Aerospace is set to adopt it widely, dropping as many as 200 legacy systems.

Mike Sweeney, project communications manager at British Aerospace, Baan?s biggest UK client, said: "The component-based concept is very useful as we?re mixing and matching Baan with other programs at the moment."

Sweeney said BAe had dropped 200 differentlegacy systems and implemented Baan in planning, finance, purchasing, manufacturing and logistics. Baan gives us a solution to do all these things," he said.

He added: "The aircraft industry is notoriously slow so we?re making enterprise-wide installations over the next few years to try and make our engineering process concurrent rather than sequential."

BaanSeries, which also includes applications from Baan?s business partners, is due for controlled release in April and general release in June.

BaanSeries, which the company claims will mark the end of ?Big Bang ERP?, is described as a ?product family? of open, standalone components which can be integrated with both legacy and new business applications as and when suits the customer. The first products available in the series are BaanERP and DEM-SE.

The new ERP will offer EMU compliance and customer services capabilities to its applications. The software which cover manufacturing, planning & scheduling, logistics and sales, distribution & warehousing, service, electronic commerce commerce and finance comes from Baan?s partners as well as the company itself.

The company puts a huge emphasis on the importance of its many partnerships, collectively dubbed the BaanWeb, to ensure best-in-class products. The BaanSeries will involve help from ?hundreds of partners? as it grows.

The company, whose success has been confined mainly to manufacturing companies, listed its acquisition of Coda as instrumental in its aim to make more inroads into the services sector. It claims that its only a matter of weeks before the Coda-financial product can be integrated with its own offerings.

Bob Lewis, the President of Baan WEMEA (Western Europe, Middle East and Africa) said: "You have to have a good financial application as a backbone. This will help us to move rapidly into the finance, services and public sectors."

Baan also believes the increased flexibility and speedier implementation will draw small and medium-sized businesses into the enterprise systems market. It is targeting such companies.

Lewis said: "The product scales very well for smaller or larger companies."