September 2006 Meeting Minutes

Date:      Thursday, September 28, 2006
Time:      9:00 am – 4:00 pm MST
Location: Memorial Health System MAC Building
             in Colorado Springs

 

Introductions

The meeting began with the committee chair, Sue Parkins, welcoming the group to Rocky Mountain User Group Meeting. Sue provided the group with several updates. The meeting had 68 attendees.

She described changes in the committee staff and introduced those individuals to everyone. Then she expanded on the strategic direction, and informed everyone of the use of the Digital Concourse for registration and eventually the possible move of ROMLUG.com to the Digital Concourse venue.

Many Lawson partners were present including JGI, CIBER, Velocity, MHC, Kinsey & Kinsey to name a few.

The group is always looking for new location opportunities. Please contact Sue if you have any information in this area.

The next meeting will be on December 14, 2006 sponsored by Boulder Valley Schools.

The Meeting

The first speakers were Toni Kennedy and Mary Dvorak from Lawson.

Toni introduced Mary as the new Account Manager for the ROMLUG group. She also introduced the other Lawson representatives who were present for the meeting.

Toni then played a video that included presentations from several of Lawson’s senior management team. The presentations focused on Lawson’s new commitment to better communication for existing customers. Their goal of “Simpler is Better” was elaborated upon. Jim Anderson spoke for the video introduction. Jim Catalino provided a migration solutions update. Dean Hager gave the Sales Summit highlights presentations.

It was said that Lawson expects to do 600 upgrades this year. This point illustrates that the company believes they are strong in their ability to provide this service to their customers. (Don’t be Afraid to upgrade!)

There are 178 customers already on LSF 9.0. Lastly, an informative demonstration on using Knowledge Base via the Lawson customer support site was provided.

After the video completed, Mary Dvorak spoke of her enthusiasm to work with the ROMLUG group. She distributed company specific “client care” model information and a gift. Welcome to ROMLUG, Mary!

 

Next, Matthew Nye (on the right) from JGI gave a very informative presentation on the Lawson Business Intelligence (LBI) product. He reviewed in-depth features and functionality.

Matthew Nye's LBI Presentation

Joe Faltesek from Lawson was up next with a presentation on the Design Wizard Queries within MS Add-Ins. He demonstrated several examples of powerful reporting, graphs, and publishing functionality.

He informed the group that he observed the Portal feature of Lawson 9.0 having 3 times the speed in regular screens and performing 17 times faster in drill around screens than in earlier versions.

Joe provided many PowerPoint presentations, Webex presentations, sample LBI files, etc. showing how to configure and use LBI. These include HR Security, Pay History, Report Bursting, Report History, and reporting in Crystal. These files occupy a total of over 60 megs, though, so we zipped them together into a single zip file (which still occupies 56 megs). You're welcome to download the LBI zip file here, but realize that it may take a few moments.

 

Burke Stucker from Lawson walked the group through the Goals and Purpose of the Lawson Enhancement process.

 

 

At this point, we split into break-out groups (HR, Financials, Materials and Supply Chain). Each group reviewed the starter lists for their modules and voted on a Top Ten list to be submitted to Lawson for their annual survey from ROMLUG. The enhancements finalists will be reviewed at CUE 2007.

 

 

After Lunch Joe Faltesek gave another presentation - on the functionality of security in Lawson’s Portal 9.0. This version can secure access based on related tables. He summarized the new features and gave specific examples of the changes, which included LAUA going away.

He reiterated that the new Portal is much faster than Lawson Interface Desktop (LID).

Joe Faltesek's Security 9 Presentation

 

Kevin Cubillas, the Director of Strategic Projects for Boulder Valley Schools gave a presentation on their implementation of Lawson 9.0. He talked about their goals, expectations, surprises, challenges, how it really went, what they learned, and the benefits of being on the latest version. He answered several questions from the group.

Kevin Cubillas' LSF 9 Presentation

 

The User Group Committee would like to thank Memorial Hospital of Colorado Springs for hosting the location, Velocity for sponsoring breakfast, and JGI for sponsoring lunch for our ROMLUG meeting!