R "Ray" Wang
R "Ray" WangEvent Report: Lawson Cues Up New Offerings with Flair
(Courtesy of Lawson Software Inc.)
- General availability of Lawson Talent Management. As a part of Lawson's Strategic Human Capital Management System, Talent Management delivers capabilities in talent acquisition, performance management, succession management, learning and development, and compensation management. The solution can be delivered as a SaaS model or directly integrated within the Lawson Core HR application. Facebook integration, Smart Client capability, and an International roll out strategy help move Lawson from a North American offering to one with Web 2.0 relevance and international reach.
- Lawson Smart Office information workplace offering. Smart Office is a Rich Internet user experience for S3 and M3 customers that is a part of Lawson's User Productivity Platform (UPP). Key features include dynamic personalization, collaboration and workflow, interoperability with Microsoft Office, and integrated Business Intelligence. The offering brings together tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Groove within the Lawson environment. Capabilities in rich personalization include personalized field labels, bookmarks, conditional styling, tab order configuration, personal alerts, and configuration of fields and columns. (More screen shots courtesy of Lawson). Collaboration and workflow deliver "Visio based" approaches to managing business processes. Built on Windows Presentation Foundation, Lawson's Smart Office interface runs rings around current offerings from larger ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP and is in the same League as IFS' Project Aurora and Epicor's ICE 2.0 interfaces.
(Courtesy of Lawson Software Inc.)
- Lawson M3 Trace Engine 3.0 designed for food safety for food and beverage enterprises. Meeting current and future compliance requirements for EU and US food safety regulations, M3 Trace Engine simplifies the process of tracking ingredients and finished products. This latest release brings key functionality to the US market. With growing concerns about overall food safety, enterprises need to share trace data such as product origin and transport data, provide evidence about product trace lines, and recreate history in the event of food safety incidents.
- Acquisition of Freeborders for key PLM capabilities for the fashion industry. Lawson acquired the PLM division of San Francisco based Freeborders. With very short product life cycle times for product concept to retail store shelf placement, PLM will provide fashion manufactures with quicker sourcing capabilities and lead time reduction. Lawson will add 79 global customers and the product will be sold as a stand alone product.
The bottom line
Feedback from customers at CUE, one on one's with key executives, and discussions with partners demonstrate that the senior management team has managed to turnaround the company while also digesting an acquisition. New offerings with a strong industry focus and future product strategy bode well for the 4000+ customers and potential prospects in key industries such as health care, public sector, food and beverage, fashion, equipment service management and rental, and distribution. Expect Lawson to continue to expand its international presence while remaining focused on its core markets.
(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved