LawsonGuru Blog
Thought-Provoking Commentary for the Lawson Software Community
Is Lawson Enterprise-Ready?
Posted by on February 14, 2008
This is a topic which always generates a lot of debate. On the one hand, you have Lawson, which touts its “enterprise-readiness”, and its ability to support large enterprises. Most of us think of Lawson as a software vendor targeting small-to-medium companies, but ask any Lawson executive or salesperson, and they will tell you, “oh, we compete with SAP and Oracle all they time, and we win, too!”
Some oft-cited examples:
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McDonalds uses Lawson Payroll to pay its employees
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Wal-Mart licensed Lawson HR to support its operations
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L.L. Bean uses Lawson
On the other hand, we have what I’d call “client reality”, and it’s often a different story. Just over the past few weeks, I’ve come across some examples where Lawson just can’t cut it:
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Try to create an AR ”customer list”, and you’ll soon find out that Lawson doesn’t expect you to have more than 999,999 customers!
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Lawson Activity Management and Billing & Revenue lock all Activities when posting and processing, since there’s no way to know in advance which ones have transactions to be processed. Lawson response is that the client should have “smaller activity groupsand fewer activities and run more jobs”, without recognizing what it means to process for a large global company.
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Manually-defined HR employee groups can’t have more than 10,000 employees (on this one I guess I’d agree with Lawson that any list which requires manual maintenance shouldn’t really have that many employees–and that there should be some criteria which is common enough across that group to make it an automatically-populated employee group. But just the same, a “duplicate record” error isn’t the right “solution”.
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