Healthcare organizations completing Lawson deployments in the past year include Altoona Regional Health System, Baptist Health, Bassett Healthcare, Bethesda Lutheran Homes and Services, Inc., Carle Clinic, Carle Foundation Hospital, Catholic Health Initiatives, Catholic Healthcare West, Coffee Health Group, Gwinnett Hospital System, McLeod Health, Norton Healthcare, Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, Presbyterian Homes and Services, Providence Health & Services, Sherman Health, Sisters of Mercy Health System, Torrance Memorial Medical Center, UCLA Health System and University Medical Center at Princeton among others.

Elgin, Ill.-based Sherman Health, for example, went live on the Lawson S3 Human Capital Management, Enterprise Financial Management and Supply Chain Management Suites in October 2006. “Lawson is helping us reduce administrative costs and streamline regulatory compliance by supporting timely reporting and standardized business processes,” said Bill Kelty, director of Information Services, Sherman Health.

Bassett Healthcare, a Lawson customer since 1997, implemented the Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9 application last fall as a beta site. “Our long-term partnership with Lawson is based on Lawson’s ability to support our evolving technical and strategic business needs,” said Sue Andrews, senior director of Corporate Finance, for New York’s Bassett Healthcare. “We’re currently deploying additional Lawson applications to support automated report distribution, employee absence management and mobile supply chain management.”

Last July, a 20-year-old legacy mainframe system was replaced at Carle Clinic and Carle Foundation Hospital in central Illinois when the two separate organizations both implemented the Lawson S3 Human Capital Management and Enterprise Financial Management Suites. Today, more than 5,000 Carle employees use the software, which interfaces directly with Carle’s Kronos Time and Attendance system.

“We chose Lawson based on its proven business applications, extensive healthcare customer base and reputation for successful implementations,” said Rick Rinehart, interim vice president IT and CIO, Carle Clinic and Carle Foundation Hospital.

Lawson works with each customer to conduct a comprehensive business process assessment before implementation begins. This enables healthcare providers to standardize processes across their organization, create automated workflows and incorporate industry best practices into their implementation plans.

“Deep expertise gained during hundreds of healthcare implementations enables us to help customers speed system deployment so they can achieve their business objectives faster,” said Rob Jorgenson, senior vice president, Lawson Professional Services. “Our success in helping these providers streamline system rollout reinforces our deep industry knowledge and commitment to healthcare implementation excellence.”

Lawson serves more than 500 healthcare industry customers representing more than 4,500 facilities, including eight of the top 10 integrated delivery networks. The company also serves managed care systems, academic medical centers, hospitals, clinics, physician group practices, home healthcare, long-term care and other health services enterprises. Lawson solutions help healthcare organizations manage their business so they can focus on their patients, automate and streamline materials management for a better bottom line, and overcome the challenges of the labor shortage.

The city of Little Rock is the capital of Arkansas and the state’s largest city. Its 2,500 employees serve more than 183,000 citizens. Faced with disparate business systems that limited data access to a small group of employees, the city turned to Lawson to help it improve access to key financial and purchasing information and streamline business processes.

“Lawson’s government expertise and user-friendly, Web-based applications made it our best option,” said Bob Biles, finance director, city of Little Rock. “Because of the project’s scope and our limited resources, we chose to partner with Lawson Professional Services on project management. The Lawson team has played a key role in helping us go live on time and within our budget.”

Little Rock took a multi-phased approach to its Lawson implementation, starting with the financial and supply chain applications in phase one. The city created a cross-departmental project team and an executive steering committee to manage the implementation. Throughout phase one, the committee and project team conducted monthly meetings to communicate progress to other city employees and resolve any issues.

Since completing its Lawson implementation, the city has more than doubled the number of employees that access the unified system from key departments, such as human resources, payroll and accounting. This improved data access is helping the city eliminate manual processes and facilitate electronic requisition approvals via automated workflows. The new system is also helping the city enhance its reporting capabilities by consolidating critical data in a single system, replacing individual spreadsheets.

The new Lawson applications and technology platform are also helping the city reduce administrative cost by supporting more efficient purchasing processes, better budget control and improved encumbrance and grant management reporting. And, Lawson System Foundation 9.0 features the latest technology from Lawson combined with other world-class technologies, for a high-performance, standards-based technology solution. This highly secure and solid foundation provides a platform for Lawson’s next-generation applications designed for use within a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The city is now embarking on the second phase of its Lawson rollout, which includes deployment of the Lawson Human Capital Management and Budgeting and Planning suites. Little Rock expects to be live on both applications by June 30, 2007.

“More and more, public services organizations are finding that their legacy administrative systems cannot keep pace with the pressures to increase productivity while providing new services at minimal cost,” said Ken Munson, industry marketing director, Government & Education, Lawson Software. “These organizations turn to Lawson for our public services expertise and commitment, our flexible, comprehensive software and services and our sensible lifecycle costs. We enable cities and counties to simplify the business of government so they can focus resources on serving their communities.”

Lawson serves more than 120 public services customers, including three of the top seven digital state governments and four of the 25 largest school districts in the United States. Lawson’s software is in use at almost 3,000 schools with combined enrollments exceeding 1.75 million students and 200,000 staff members. School districts, cities, counties, state governments, publicly owned utilities and municipal districts rely on Lawson’s solutions to help meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders – students, constituents, employees, vendors and the community – while helping to maximize limited budgets.

“Thousands of Lawson customers and prospects depend on System i to run their businesses reliably and cost-effectively,” said Guenther Tolkmit, senior vice president of product development, Lawson. “That is why it is important to give them access to the same Lawson 9 benefits as our other customers, including industry-standard technology that is leading toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and new application enhancements tailored for industry-specific needs.”

Designed in response to customer and marketplace demands for less complexity, Lawson 9 lays the foundation for moving to SOA and establishes a planned path for customers to purchase future Lawson Landmark-based applications. It includes the new Lawson technology layer, enhanced business applications, strengthened business intelligence capabilities and enhanced business process management tools.

Lawson 9 supports i5/OS Version 5 Release 3 (V5R3) and i5/OS Version 5 Release 4 (V5R4) – the newest version of the IBM integrated operating system – and is optimized for IBM middleware including WebSphere Application Server ND. Furthermore, it simplifies the total ownership experience with simplified purchase pricing, versioning, packaging, maintenance contracts and support for customers.

Great Plains Coca-Cola has already been using Lawson 9 on System i successfully. “Lawson and IBM continue to partner with Great Plains Coca-Cola to extend our System i investments, keep our systems current and help us derive greater value from our technology investments,” said Clayton Sliger, chief financial officer, Great Plains Coca-Cola.

New Technology Layer

To present high-performance, standards-based technology to Lawson customers, Lawson System Foundation 9.0 combines the company’s best technology with IBM’s marketplace-leading WebSphere Application Server ND middleware.

The new technology layer features improved user interfaces that apply user-centered design principles based on customer suggestions and feedback. It delivers solid security, scalability, performance and usability.

Since its initial release in November 2005 for IBM AIX, Windows, HP PA-RISC and Sun Solaris, Lawson System Foundation 9.0 has been adopted faster than any previous technology release from Lawson.

Enhanced Core Applications

The release of Lawson 9 business management solutions includes enhancements to core ERP applications, including:

• Lawson Business Intelligence – This application allows improved access to information for discovering trends, finding problems and analyzing the drivers of business performance. The report “bursting” capability helps organizations create rich, highly formatted reports based on enterprise-wide data, and then create rules for “view-time security” so authorized portions of the report are automatically distributed to appropriate staff.
• Lawson Human Capital Management – Lawson Employee & Manager Self-Service has been enhanced to offer more information to employees and managers, driving faster user adoption of self-service functionality and reducing administrative costs. Lawson Absence Management helps streamline and automate labor-intensive tasks while enhanced Lawson Position Management capabilities help make it easier to manage a more fluid, flexible workforce.
• Lawson Supply Chain Management – Lawson Procurement Cards functionality enables companies to streamline purchasing processes by empowering authorized employees to use credit cards for purchasing, rather than formal requisition and purchase order processes. This can help maximize rebates and reduce transaction costs, acquisition lag times for purchases and invoicing, and receiving and reconciliation overhead.
• Lawson Enterprise Financial Management – Enhancements to the Lawson Budgeting & Planning application make collaborative, auditable budgeting practices core to the strategic planning and analysis process. Features within Lawson Grant Management enable the optimization of grant-based revenues for research or other grants and ease the compliance process. Lawson Deductions Management provides key new financial management and reporting capability. An improved Lawson Cash Management application offers opportunities for greater capital productivity, efficiency and fraud prevention while assisting with local legislation compliance. New allocation features allow the Lawson Strategic Ledger module to capture the financial consequences of customer interactions in a variety of ways for multi-dimensional analysis, accountability and statutory reporting. Created primarily for financial services industries, these capabilities will enable new operational efficiency and insight opportunities for all Lawson customers.

Enhanced Tools

Lawson Business Process Management provides the tools necessary to manage world-class, end-to-end business processes, including underlying application design and configuration, business process design and execution, business process security, and enterprise business process integration with internal and external interaction points. Lawson Business Process Management helps customers streamline, integrate and secure their business processes.

A Simple Path to SOA

Lawson 9 enables customers to incorporate Lawson Landmark-based applications designed to deploy in an SOA. Landmark-based applications will help customers receive industry-specific or functional-specific applications without the usual lengthy product development cycles. Lawson customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of the Landmark-based applications without having to migrate all of their applications at one time. Landmark-based applications and Web Services will be rolled out gradually and will be purchased separately. Information relating to separate pricing for Landmark-based applications will be provided when Landmark-based applications are made available.

“Lawson’s continued support of the System i platform is outstanding news for our customers,” said Mark Shearer, general manager, IBM System i. “We work very closely with the Lawson team to make sure their applications run better on System i than any other platform. By supporting the new i5/OS V5R4 features, Lawson applications can provide our customers with a reliable and cost-effective solution, particularly for getting started with SOA.”

Based in Mobile, Ala., Springhill Medical Center has 1,375 employees and operates a 252-bed, acute care facility serving the greater Mobile community. Springhill Medical Center also operates several clinical centers, including the Women’s Diagnostic Center, the Diabetes Educational Center, the Cancer Center, the Center for Wound Care and Hyperbaric Medicine, and the Southwest Regional Center for Sleep/Wake Disorders.

“Our existing software could no longer sufficiently support our operations, so we sought a new business system that would help us create a more efficient, flexible work environment,” said Beckie Crawford, vice president of Finance, Springhill Medical Center. “The unified Lawson system offers the flexibility and scalability we need to support our long-term growth along with timely data access to enhance financial decision-making.”

The comprehensive Lawson system will help Springhill consolidate and automate its core business processes, such as capital expenditures, accounts payable and the administration of employee benefits. It will also provide a single, user-friendly interface for employees to access information. In addition, the Lawson applications will enable Springhill to create financial reports and distribute them electronically. This timely business intelligence will provide greater insight into organization-wide data, helping Springhill decision-makers reduce administrative costs and support the medical center’s growth plan.

“Community healthcare organizations need intuitive business systems that help them reduce administration so they can conserve scarce resources for patient care,” said Sara Van Kempen, healthcare marketing director, Lawson Software. “Springhill Medical Center joins a growing number of community hospitals choosing Lawson to address their operational challenges and achieve real business results – all at the lowest total cost of ownership.”

Lawson serves more than 500 healthcare industry customers representing more than 4,500 facilities, including eight of the top 10 integrated delivery networks. The company also serves managed care systems, academic medical centers, hospitals, clinics, physician group practices, home healthcare, long-term care and other health services enterprises. Lawson solutions help healthcare organizations manage their business so they can focus on their patients, automate and streamline materials management for a better bottom line, and overcome the challenges of the labor shortage.

Bassett Healthcare, a rural teaching hospital in upstate New York, provides one example of how Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9 can deliver strategic benefits. Bassett and its affiliates consist of four hospitals and 23 health centers covering 5,000 square miles in eight counties. Accurate forecasts are critical to the success of this rural healthcare network, but in the past the budgeting process was inefficient.

“Before Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9, the budgeting process was tedious, and consumed valuable staff time and dollars,” said Christopher W. Graham, director of finance, Budget and Administrative Services, Bassett Healthcare. “Now we have eliminated much of the time spent extracting and organizing data and have developed a more accurate budgeting process, resulting in more effective cost controls across our organization.”

Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9 is designed to work with core Lawson systems, such as Lawson General Ledger and Lawson Human Capital Management, and it can co-exist with non-Lawson data sources. The application is designed for ease of use and gives users better context in the planning environment, which can lead to more accurate forecasts and better budgeting decisions.

“It’s important for an organization to have real-time visibility of their financial picture, so everyone, from the CEO to line manager, can quickly take corrective action and mitigate risk,” said Dean Hager, senior vice president of product management for Lawson. “Our customers can spend less time extracting and organizing data and focus on making the critical decisions needed to achieve their profitability and business objectives.”

By automating an organization’s budgeting process, Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9 helps achieve and maintain accurate visibility over forward-looking financial pictures, critical to achieving an organization’s profitability objectives. Since Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9 was designed to be embraced across the organization and not just in the finance department, the user interface can be tailored to individual areas of responsibility through a role-based security model. The design helps give everyone involved in the budgeting process the opportunity to participate in collaborative planning and forecasting.

A Web seminar featuring the Basset Healthcare implementation of Lawson Budgeting & Planning 9 is scheduled for Nov. 16 at 2 p.m. Central Standard Time. To participate in this Web seminar, register at http://www.lawson.com/lbp. To learn more about Bassett Healthcare, visit www.bassett.org.