BUCA Taps Lawson for ERP Consolidation Project

Corrected: August 28, 2006

by Alex Woodie

BUCA, a $250 million Italian restaurant chain, is standardizing on Lawson Software's Windows-based ERP system, the St. Paul, Minnesota, software vendor announced last week. The move by BUCA to replace disparate applications and manual processes with a single, integrated system is part of an effort to fortify the company's information gathering process and enable it to make more nimble business decisions.

Dennis Goetz, vice president and chief accounting officer for the restaurant chain, says there was lack of integration among BUCA's legacy computer systems, including Microsoft's Solomon accounting systems, the FAS fixed asset accounting system from Sage Software, and spreadsheets. By overhauling the system and centralizing it around Lawson--including its financial management, supply chain management, and business intelligence suites--Goetz hopes to streamline data collection, thereby making it easier for executives to make the right business decisions.

"All of these applications were separate, with financial data being uploaded into Solomon in the form of manual journal entries," Goetz says. "One of the major changes being implemented with the Lawson system is to automate the integration between systems. Lawson will be receiving automated feeds from our point of sale system, from ADP (for payroll), from our store-level accounting system (for inventory and accounts payable Invoices), and from our bank (for deposits). Store-level P&Ls (profit and loss statements) and financial reporting will now come from Lawson versus the store-level accounting system."

The contract between Lawson and BUCA was signed during Lawson's third quarter, which ended February 28. The software will be deployed on four Hewlett-Packard servers, including two ML570s for production and development, and two DL380s for the database and business intelligence applications. The software will run on a combination of Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server, and will be served to the company's 104 restaurants using a VPN and Web portal software.

This article has been corrected. Buca signed a contract with Lawson during the third quarter of Lawson's fiscal year 2006, not the thrid quarter of the calendar year. IT Jungle regrets the error.