Insurance Company to Install Lawson S3 on System i
September 4, 2007 Alex Woodie
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American Safety Insurance Services (ASI) has licensed Lawson Software‘s S3 Financial Management Suite to replace a 15-year old legacy system that relied on inefficient paper-based processes. The new system, which will be installed on IBM System i hardware, is predicted to decrease the amount of time ASI personnel spent on key processes by up to 40 percent. ASI is a Bermuda-based company that sells various insurance and reinsurance products and solutions to small and mid size businesses in Bermuda and in the U.S. The company, which is publicly traded and had $171 million in revenues for its last fiscal year, wasn’t happy with the reporting capabilities of its previous IT system, which took 10 days to complete the financial closing period. “We wanted to have greater visibility into key business processes across our organization and to accelerate our financial reporting processes, but our 15-year-old legacy financial system couldn’t support those goals,” ASI’s CFO, Bill Tepe, says. After an extensive evaluation process, the company chose Lawson’s S3 suite of software. S3, which stands for “staff, source, and serve,” is usually deployed on Unix or Windows platforms, but Lawson has a smattering of i5/OS customers using it, too. ASI licensed Lawson’s S3 Enterprise Financial Management Suite and Lawson System Foundation (LSF) 9 middleware during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, which ended May 31. When the software is finally implemented on new IBM System i servers, ASI expects to reap several benefits. One way ASI expects to benefit is by the creation of automated workflows, which will streamline certain financial processes, such as budgeting and forecasting. It is also expected to increase employee productivity by eliminating duplicate data entry. Overall, ASI expects S3 and LSF 9 to help it complete its financial closing tasks in six days instead of 10 days, a 40 percent improvement.
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