In Argentina, multinational companies such as Sara Lee and Astrazeneca laboratories have implemented Gaci Group's software. The software has been developed with GeneXus with the Visual Fox Pro generator and has replaced BPCS (from SSA) after being confronted to ERPs such as SAP or J.D.Edwards.
Gaci is a management system that cannot be introduced as a ready-to-solve-it-all product or as a whole package. The reason for this is that together with its modules accounting-administration, inventory and production, purchase management, commercial management, and budget it offers a great customization power.
"The general reason that explains our competitive position against SAP or J.D.Edwards, for instance, lies on the fact that we prove a similar feature at a much lower cost. To this, we should add the customization power of this technology plus following the evolution of the solution as it matches the evolution of the business. Other ERPs lack reasonable costs for keeping up with such an evolution," said Gustavo Jacob, Gaci Group Director.
"The first alternative that we assessed, was using the same management software used in the headquarters," explained Roberto Leonardi, Astrazeneca's IT Chief, to Itecsa Journal. After having considered another ERP with a strong presence in the market, the laboratory finally decided on Gaci because it offered a better cost-benefit relation. Moreover, "the system fulfilled our needs and provided the flexibility and scalability that we needed in order to grow; it even enabled us to handle two environments -testing and production- in the same server," reported Daniel Agra Fidalgo, Astrazeneca's IT Manager, to the above-mentioned journal.
Customized modules for quality and cost control as well as interfaces for Gaci's communication with the systems used at the headquarters were developed at Astrazeneca.
Sara Lee has also adopted Gaci for bringing the IT systems of Sol y Oro lingerie (an Argentine business that the multinational company acquired in 2000)up to speed. Favio Alonso, Sara Lee's Systems Manager, reported to the Information Technology magazine that "buying the version for PyMes (from SAP), which they could have done, would have meant adapting the company to the software and not the other way around." He also added: "The possibility of banking on the knowledge bases which would eventually enable them to continue the programming on GeneXus regardless of the vendor, was also valued."
Gaci resulted from Núcleo, Mariano De Larrobla's original accounting knowledge base, from which Bantotal also was born. Mariano de Larrobla introduced GeneXus to Jacob, who adopted it in 1991.
"GeneXus has changed the way of making systems. As I see it, its most important virtue does not lie in the management of code or in its multi-platform capacity, but in the handling of the structures and databases; this is what it gives, in a timely and cost-efficient manner, to products that have been built with the Evolutional Incremental Dynamics technology. This turns the concept of package into solution," Jacob explained.