How you can drive business transformation with Infor industry CloudSuites

There has never been a better opportunity for you to embrace technology that drives innovation. Transforming and evolving as an organization is now a requirement to thrive and protect continuity of business. Infor helps Lawson S3 customers drive digital transformation and ensure business continuity with Infor industry CloudSuites. Infor CloudSuite customers leverage improved automation and role-based security to tighten access to sensitive data, scale quickly and efficiently, and harness the power and responsiveness of Infor’s modern system architecture to stay ahead and compete.

Infor CloudSuites are built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the market leader for cloud-based infrastructure as a service and platform as a service for over 10 years. This best-in-class system architecture is purpose-built for innovation, providing you with industry-leading scalability and availability, integrated governance and control, and unparalleled extensibility to democratize data for end users.

Infor CloudSuites, including CloudSuite Healthcare, CloudSuite Corporate, and CloudSuite Public Sector, provide an easy path for Lawson S3 financials and global human resources customers to digitally evolve business operations. CloudSuites deliver industry-specific capabilities without extensive customizations or integrations. Infor’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) competitors struggle to tap into the latest advances in enterprise functionality with as little business disruption and as cost effectively as with our AWS tag team.

This post introduces the top 10 functional enhancements available in Infor industry CloudSuites regarding legacy Lawson S3 solutions.

1. Automatic updates

Updated technology can remove the pressure of maintaining and updating systems, allowing you to focus your time, effort, and money into fulfilling your core business strategies. Lawson S3 customers that run their own IT infrastructure must also handle software updates, so that any security vulnerabilities are patched up and that the technology they’re using is up to date. Infor CloudSuites push monthly customer updates (CUs) automatically, saving you valuable time, expense, and energy: Infor also conducts regression testing for every CU to protect against any service disruption.

2. Mobility

In this age of working from anywhere, mobility is paramount. Lawson S3 customers are tethered to their desktops to access enterprise applications. By comparison, Infor CloudSuites can be accessed by desktop or mobile devices with Infor Go. Infor Go enables you to seamlessly glide between applications to provide a role-based mobile experience that increases data accessibility, informed decision making, and productivity. The solution also provides two-way communication through alerts, push notifications, and collaboration.

3. Stronger security protocols

According to Gartner, the annual cost to own and manage on-premise software applications can be up to four times the cost of the initial purchase. In the same report titled “Top Ten Cloud Myths”, Gartner also states that the commercial cloud is always more secure than an on-premise software deployment.

Infor CloudSuites employ a defense-in-depth strategy with AWS to implement multiple layers of overlapping security that safeguard customer data. That data is guarded through each link of the value chain and to ensure a high level of solution availability. In addition, with role-based security within Infor CloudSuite applications individual customers have the freedom to determine their own security settings and restrictions.

4. Decision support

Businesses today do not operate in disconnected silos. Business intelligence and analytics solutions shouldn’t either. But this is often what results with desktop-based discovery tools that cannot deliver enterprise-wide analytics and governance. You employees are often constrained by these analytical silos, and the result is undermined trust in data and poor decision making.

Business intelligence is an add-on capability for Lawson S3 customers. Infor CloudSuites come with Infor Birst embedded business intelligence to deliver a comprehensive platform that pre-integrates data management, visual language, and analysis in a single place.

5. Globalization

The globalization benefits of cloud computing have enabled fast growth and adaption of the cloud computing technology by organizations across the world. Localizations for Lawson S3 solutions are extremely limited.

Infor CloudSuites leverage the global capabilities of AWS and offer Infor customers the power and responsiveness they need to stay ahead in a business environment that’s more fiercely competitive than ever. AWS has the largest global footprint of any cloud provider. That includes 80 Availability Zones across 25 regions, with plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, and Switzerland.

Lastly, while Lawson S3 is offered in English language only, Infor CloudSuites are offered in 20 languages today and localized for 33 countries. Localization includes statutory, tax, and local regulations.

6. Connectivity

Over the years, many customers running legacy Lawson S3 applications have assembled a collection of disparate, disconnected business applications. That makes a coherent, unified ERP strategy difficult to execute.

Infor CloudSuites are built on Infor OS (Operating Service), a digital transformation platform which makes data integration, analysis, and exploration easy. Infor OS is the nucleus of the CloudSuite ecosystem which provides you with seamless integration to Infor and non-Infor applications, an extensive single-sign-on (SSO), and simplified user management. For instance, with Infor CloudSuite Healthcare, customers can integrate third-party electronic health record (EHR) data via Infor OS to drive operational insights and improve patient outcomes.

7. Document management

Electronic document management solutions enable you to easily share, store, and secure files. Lawson S3 requires a third-party solution to produce output documents for vendors and customers. This means an additional fee for customers to produce these files.

Infor Document Management (IDM) is deployed and integrated within the Infor OS portal and available free-of-charge to Infor CloudSuite customers. IDM is a central repository where customers can maintain common business rules for creating documents and view, edit, create, and store physical vendor and customer files.

8. Corporate governance

Effective corporate compliance solutions can help modern organizations reduce risk and improve control effectiveness, security, and compliance through an integrated and unified approach that reduces the negative effects of organizational silos and redundancies.

Lawson S3 customers must procure a third-party solution for sustainable risk management or internal controls beyond the manually configured security roles in their application. In contrast, Infor CloudSuite is fully integrated with Infor Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC), the market leader for integrated risk and compliance management. With Infor GRC integration, industry CloudSuite customers can reduce the potential business risks and the costs of compliance, increase operational efficiency, and fully automate the audit process.

9. Modern user interface

According to the recent Deloitte Millennial Survey, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025. As the world’s first digitally native generation, Deloitte reports that millennials demand modern work technology that mirrors the modern tools of their upbringing.

Lawson S3 is built on COBOL technology that was popularized in their parents’ generation. Infor industry CloudSuites are built on Java technology with a modern UI and cutting edge, role-based dashboards that are vibrant and intuitive. This delivers experiences that are similar to those the modern workforce encounters in their daily life across social media and other channels.

10. Reporting

Lawson S3 requires that users run individual reports and navigate to a central report repository to access content. Infor CloudSuites, however, are built with the user experience front and center and allow for more streamlined operational reporting. Infor industry CloudSuites include over 4,000 list views where you can personalize and filter data in real-time and export this data to MS Excel for further analysis or to a PDF file for submission.

Drive business transformation now

Infor CloudSuites provide an ideal path for Lawson S3 customers to digitally transform their businesses with minimal risk of business disruption and the lowest cost.

We understand the importance of building a strong technology foundation to enable you to scale toward the future intelligently and cost-effectively while always keeping present goals firmly in mind. We are committed to be your strategic digital transformation partner and bring the highest level of organizational excellence to any project.

As we work together to help you overcome your challenges and achieve your mission, we are dedicated to aligning our expertise with yours as you define success in a new era.

– Jim Perry
Sr. Director, Global Product and Industry Strategy, Financials, Infor