Lawson Addresses Healthcare Vertical, User-Friendly BI Wares

ERP software vendor Lawson has announced a new healthcare-focused analytics tool and a slew of new offerings aimed at making BI easier on the brain during its annual user confab.

Known for its portfolio of enterprise resource planning solutions that focuses on specific verticals rather than a one-size-fits-all offering, Lawson is bolstering its healthcare lineup with Lawson Analytics for Healthcare, which extracts data from supply chain, staffing and financial applications – from both Lawson and other third-party vendors’ programs – to offer up metrics aimed at helping users improve their overall business performance, according to the company.

The company also introduced Lawson Mashup Designer, a tool that enables users to extract data from multiple resources and create their own composite application for business intelligence. The tool is aimed at Lawson power users, system administrators and programmers, and is currently available for the company’s M3 Enterprise Management System, with May 2011 availability for S3 Enterprise Management System.

In a similar vein, Lawson also announced ViewPoint for Lawson Business Intelligence, an analytic application builder that enables users to create customized dashboards and views of data derived from Lawson Smart Office and Lawson Business Intelligence.

And last, but certainly not least, Lawson has opened an app store featuring third-party add-ons to improve users’ productivity and efficiency, according to the company. The Lawson Marketplace currently has about 180 applications at a price point “that makes it easy for the user to expense them without going through significant and time-consuming approval processes,” the company said.

The new offerings were announced at Lawson CUE (Conference and User Experience) 2011 this week in Boston, which brings together Lawson and its partners and customers. Lawson has been a technology stalwart since E was combined with R and P, and its moves of late show the company is working hard to stay relevant in the business intelligence space. In 2010 the company unveiled its cloud strategy, and its latest releases demonstrate Lawson’s commitment to helping its customers access data intelligently, no matter which system it resides on, and increase their productivity. That’s also good news for its channel partners, whose success ultimately depends on the strength and the usability of the technology they represent.

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