Lawson HR and Payroll Software Review

Lawson Strengths and Weaknesses

Lawson’s competitive positioning in the payroll (and wider HR) software market can be summarized by highlighting the following strengths and weaknesses.

Lawson Strengths
 

• Lawson's 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 organizations with a disparate workforce or simply in need of location-agnostic functionality (particularly for employee and manager self-service).
• Lawson’s Business Intelligence functionality is solid and generally (with some advanced exceptions) on a par with or surpasses the feature sets available from similarly-situated vendors such as Oracle, SAP, and Workday.
• The Infor acquisition has put operations effectively in the hands of an organization that is ‘SaaS-friendly’ (as opposed to the previous Lawson CEO, Harry Debes who was directly opposed to that deployment model and even commented publicly that the SaaS market would collapse by 2010).
• Lawson’s offering is primarily based on the .NET framework and Windows Presentation Foundation, offering clients the advantages of a native Microsoft Windows application (this can be a major benefit for those familiar with the Windows user experience (UX).

Lawson Weaknesses
 

• Comprehensive, integrated payroll software functionality is limited to the U.S. and Canada.
• The Lawson User Interface (UI) is yet to reflect the consumerization of IT trend, particularly in comparison with similarly-situated products.
• The majority of past innovation in Lawson’s payroll and HR products has derived from software acquisitions, creating a ‘technical debt’ for more than seven HR-related 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 rapid deployment of upgrades and new versions – 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.
• Previous strategic positioning has left Lawson behind the field in terms of a viable SaaS offering; although steps are being taken to address this shortfall.

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