"It's Cordys' mission to improve customers' business operations with world-class, process oriented software which allows organizations to change and innovate the way they do business with greater speed and flexibility. "
- Cordys Mission Statement
The history of Cordys goes back to 1978 when Jan Baan, Founder of Cordys, developed a rudimentary financial model, which enabled him to simulate projected annual financial statements. In addition to his consulting work in the area of financial engineering, he started to develop business administration software for a new computer system called Durango. Very soon the Unix based software became hardware and software independent. The first steps towards an ERP system had been taken.
Largest ERP deployment in the world
Via MRP Jan Baan eventually brought a full-fledged ERP system to the market with Baan Company and became one of the three big players together with SAP and Oracle. The Baan ERP software made important contributions at companies like Boeing, Philips, ABB and Komatsu. Baan Company provided Boeing with one of the largest ERP deployments in the world, consisting of 35,000 users on a single instance.
What went wrong with ERP?
However, as a visionary, Jan Baan understood very well that ERP had its shortcomings. And he has been right. Today, ERP systems are even regarded with animosity and suspicion. The industry now believes that the benefits of ERP systems no longer justify the costs. But that is not the reason why Jan Baan founded Cordys in 2000. The Cordys vision is that ERP systems should be respected. Companies have invested huge amounts of money in them and they serve very specific and valuable goals. The only problem is that ERP is completely lacking the flexibility and agility that today's market requires.
Foundation of Cordys
During the rise of the internet and more recently of the Cloud, Jan Baan's long experience, not only with Baan Company but also with TopTier and WebEx, made him understand that the market needed a different approach. A platform that encapsulates all the good elements of existing ERP “behind the scenes” and at the same time makes use of all that Internet has to offer as the “front end”. That is the Cordys solution which reuses structured business logic together with the unstructured information to establish flexible business processes and operations that can be continuously optimized and improved, faster and quicker than ever.