Lawson Signs Customers to Software Contracts

Published: August 26, 2008

by Alex Woodie

The customer news came fast and furious from Lawson Software last week, as the St. Paul, Minnesota, ERP software developer unveiled a slew of licensing deals for S3, M3, and other products.

Lawson kicked off the customer announcements last week with IKEA, the iconic modular furnishings retailer based in Sweden that has been a big M3 customer since the Intentia days (prior to Lawson's acquisition of Intentia). In 2004, IKEA started using Lawson's Opportunity Analyzer (OA), a business modeling tool, to help it get the most out of its ERP implementation.

As part of its OA program, Lawson reports, IKEA created various key performance indicators (KPIs) to help it monitor specific areas of the business singled out for improvement. As a result of the exercise, IKEA was able to increase its profitability and product availability, and reduce order processing time. Detailed results of the program can be viewed in a Gartner report accessible at forms.lawson.com/forms/ikeareport.

Another European company standardizing on M3 (which stands for "make, move, and maintain") is Böllhoff Group, a supplier of fastening, assembly, and systems technology with operations in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. The company first started using M3 in its French operation in 2002, and last week Lawson announced it had selected M3 as its company-wide ERP standard.

"Our common ERP system has laid the foundation for optimizing our national and international inter-company processes," says Michael Hielscher, head of IT application development at Böllhoff. The company is running an IBM WebSphere-integrated version of M3 on an i5 Model 550, a Lawson spokesman says.

Lawson kept the ball rolling with several other customer wins, including ProHealth, which licensed Lawson Talent Management; the city of Santa Ana, California, which will implement Lawson's S3 (which stands for "staff, source, and serve"), including financial management, human resource, supply chain management, and business intelligence; and the University of Southern California Care Medical Group, which has licensed various S3 components, including financial management, human resources, supply chain management, and performance management.

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