Solit SA, sole distributor for Lawson in South Africa, has announced the local availability of Version 8 of the lawson.insight software suite. Chief new features are a new, 100% XML architecture, and open component extensions for mobile computing.
Vanessa Nutter, Lawson sales and marketing manager at Solit SA, says the deeply ingrained XML support takes Lawson into a new space, one she terms B2X, or "business-to-anyone" functionality.
"e-Businesses have traditionally been focused solely on the B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) concepts, but these are inherently limited in functionality," says Nutter. "By adding support for XML, lawson.insight 8.0 will permit connectivity to anyone else. This ensures Lawson customers can extend their business systems to anyone: customer, supplier, partner or employee, through any device."
Other new features to be found in lawson.insight 8 are:
e-Resource Management, which allows companies to keep track of their assets. This is becoming increasingly important in a market which is acknowledging the importance of infrastructure management.
e-Broadcasting, which electronically distributes reporting information to users over a Web-deployed Information Channel Viewer.
e-Procurement Service, e-Recruiting Service, Centralised Billing, Enterprise Relationship Management and MS OLAP Services.
Multi-Tenancy, which is of vital importance to companies involved in ASP (application service provision). Multi-Tenancy allows ASP customers to run just one copy of Lawson, no matter how many customers they support. "This is much more cost-effective and easier than having multiple copies for each customer," notes Nutter.
Lawson has also added significant add-on functionality with external applications. It has provided realtime integration between its products and CRM offerings from Siebel Systems, a leading partner. After announcing an alliance with Siebel in 2000 to become a reseller for Siebel's software, it has tightly integrated Siebel with its existing HR, financials, procurement and distribution systems.
It has also teamed with Hyperion Solutions, the world's leading business analysis software developer, to integrate Hyperion Allocations Manager and Hyperion Enterprise Reporting as part of lawson.insight 8.0.
"These are much more than cosmetic changes," notes Nutter, "and they indicate that Lawson specifically and supply chain management and enterprise business systems generally still have a major role to play in the market."
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