Lawson\u2019s introduction of their new Strategic HCM product heads into an interesting direction.\u00a0 I got the change to talk to Larry Dunivan at the Lawson CUE conference and also to see the product briefly.\u00a0 While I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019m never really negative when I see new product (hey \u2013 it should be good if it\u2019s new, right?) I definitely like the approach they\u2019ve taken with SHCM.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll start with the negative \u2013 I would not call any software product \u201cstrategic.\u201d\u00a0 Software is never what makes an HR organization strategic.\u00a0 It can make you more effective, more efficient, more accurate, etc, but it\u2019s probably not making you more strategic.\u00a0 That comes for the staff and leadership.\u00a0 My only other criticism is that it\u2019s not quite a completely integrated product, but more on that below and why they are pursuing an interesting model.\u00a0 While I\u2019m not really versed at all in the internal workings of their code, they elected not to use AJAX or Flex to code the product, instead electing to use a tool developed on their own.\u00a0 My simple opinion is that the fewer development platforms there are out there, the better.\u00a0 However, since I don\u2019t know much about what went on and what their tool does, it\u2019s not really a negative.\u00a0 After all, it\u2019s not like you\u2019d throw away PeopleTools in PeopleSoft thinking that AJAX solves the problems around building tables.<\/p>\n
What is right about the product?\u00a0 A lot \u2013 at least there\u2019s a lot that I am really interested in.\u00a0 First off, they have separated the HCM application from their popular S3 ERP suite.\u00a0 This means that they can easily add their HCM product to their M3 suite that is provided to manufacturing companies, and they don\u2019t need to develop 2 sets of code.\u00a0 Second, they decided to use their own proprietary development tool.\u00a0 Wait! You say.\u00a0 Yes, this was mentioned above as a negative, but it seems that they have cut development time and the need to actually write code with this tool.\u00a0 That makes it much more supportable, makes their development organization more scalable, and makes managing customizations eventually much less costly (when\/if they roll this tool to the client base).<\/p>\n
What was really interesting to me was that the S3 application is primarily a talent suite.\u00a0 Currently offered are talent acquisition and compensation, and performance and learning are on the way.\u00a0 What\u2019s really interesting here is that they have decided to take core HR out of the S3 application and house it in SHCM.\u00a0 This is a major departure from the rest of the industry where Core HR, benefits and payroll are housed together and talent is considered a module that is bolted on.\u00a0 Not so here.\u00a0 Lawson takes the opinion that its more important to have perfectly integrated organization, hierarchy, job, competency, etc with talent than with benefits and payroll.\u00a0 From an end to end process perspective, this is probably true, and in fact, this is what intrigues me about this product.\u00a0 I think it\u2019s a complete philosophical rethinking of the HR application that the industry needs to go through.\u00a0 Good for Lawson for being the first there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lawson\u2019s introduction of their new Strategic HCM product heads into an interesting direction.\u00a0 I got the change to talk to Larry Dunivan at the Lawson CUE conference and also to see the product briefly.\u00a0 While I\u2019ll admit that I\u2019m never…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,29,20,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hr-technology","category-hrms","category-talent-management","category-vendors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}