Infor Lawson Evaluation

Infor Lawson Strengths and Weaknesses

Lawson’s competitive positioning in the payroll and broader HCM software market can be summarized by highlighting the following enterprise software strengths and weaknesses.

Infor Lawson Strengths
 

• Lawson's focus on industry-specific software is best-in-class by virtue of the attention to sector-specific feature sets, business processes, reports and compliance requirements.
• Mobile functionality is impressive and well-suited to companies with disparate workforces or simply in need of location-agnostic functionality (particularly for employee and manager self-service).
• The Lawson Business Intelligence software is solid and generally (with some advanced exceptions) on par with the feature sets available from similarly-situated enterprise software vendors Oracle, SAP and Workday.
• The Infor acquisition has put operations effectively in the hands of a company that is growth focused and much more SaaS-friendly (for example, the prior Lawson CEO, Harry Debes, dismissed the SaaS model and even commented publicly that the SaaS market would collapse by 2010).
• The Infor Lawson software is primarily based on the .NET framework and Windows Presentation Foundation, offering customers the advantages of a native Microsoft Windows application (this can be a big benefit for those already familiar with the Windows user experience).

Infor Lawson Weaknesses
 

• Comprehensive and integrated payroll software functionality is limited to the U.S. and Canada.
• Lawson has fallen behind in the talent management software market.
• The Lawson User Interface is yet to reflect the consumerization of IT trend, particularly in comparison with similarly-situated competitors such as Workday.
• Much of past innovation with the Lawson payroll and HR software has been derived from software acquisitions, creating a technical debt (and some would suggest a patchworks integration) for more than seven HR software solutions.
• Database architecture is limited to single-tenant delivery, which, in the opinion of IDC analysis, "may pose a challenge to release strategy and vendor achievement of economies of scale." Key SaaS benefits – such as business agility and rapid deployment of upgrades and new versions – generally rely on a multi-tenant architecture. The single tenant route is often associated with a slower pace of innovation.
• Advanced human capital analytics – including data mining and predictive modeling capabilities – fall behind HR software competitors such as Oracle, SAP and Workday.
• Previous strategic positioning has left Lawson behind the field in terms of a viable SaaS HCM software solution; although steps are being taken to address this shortfall.
• Although being a part of the Infor family offers some upsides, competing for R&D, marketing dollars and executive attention with dozens of other internal brands may slow Lawson's progression.

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