How do you staff for Lawson support?

We have 4500 employees and use HR/PR, Finanancials and Procurement. We have a staff of 5 employees who provide support but also each support other major and minor systems. We do not use the system to its full potential so our staffing needs are not as great as yours.

1 - application support
1 - sys admin
1 - dba
1 - reporting
1 - AIX admin

We are similar in siz in terms of employees (about 4500), we also run all Lawson suites (HR,FIN,MM, Grants), we have LBI, LSO, DS, process flow. We have the following support model in place:

1-Sys Admin
2-Application Support
2-App Development (DS, Process Flow, LBI)
1-Team Lead (planning, coordination, project management roles)

We have some overlap as the development staff was app support analyst for years and are still out go-to people at times. Size wise you are staffed very much like we are, the roles may be slightly different. We found that when recruiting, we were limited in candidates if we solely focused on the application suite. We also were unable to effectively utilize the skills of the team by pigion holing them into one area. We found that by freeing up the support model we could recruit for quality people and teach them the tools.

Hope this helps, if you need more info feel free to reach out to me.

Thanks everyone for your feedback. It is very helpful!

Hi Everyone,

We have 2000+ employees and are currenlty using S3 for FIN, MM, Some Grants, SmartOffice, LBI, we have Landmark but only for one invoice approval workflow currently and we are starting to scope out our HR implementation which will include Global HR, Talent Management. We currently are supporting the system with 2 - Application Analysts for support, 1- System Admin (also supports Kronos, ADP and EDI), 1 DBA (supports Lawson as part of overall duties.

Our consultant vendor is advising we need a sys admin for Landmark AND a full time IPA developer but seems overkill for our size organization. Most of these posts are from awhile ago, wondering if anyone can share current staffing models for review.

Thanks!

Lori Neu

I wouldn't use the number of employees to determine if the recommendation is overkill, but more of what the business owners expect from the system.

I've been at clients where the employee count was 250,000+, and clients were the count is 8000...and there are two of us that do IPA each place...and I've had enough IPA, DS and Landmark work to keep me busy for years. Once the biz owners get a taste of what ProcessFlows can do for them, they always want more.

As far as says admins - you're going to need at least 1 person dedicated to installing patches/JTs, monitoring the system, performing upgrades...you name it. At my 250,000+ client they always had 4-5 FT admins. Again, says admin staffing isn't dependent on employees, but how much you put your system through.

...just my $.02

This was very helpful information Tim, thank you for taking the time to respond!.

We have about 6000 employees and are using Procurement, Finance, and HR (including Talent Management) suites. We have 1 programmer/analyst that handles patches and upgrades and 1 DBA. We also have 2 security admins. These are IT staff and I believe that Lawson isn't the only system they deal with but it may be primary. Then we have business process experts in each area. I handle all things supply chain including EDI, MSCM and Procurement related ProcessFlows (soon to upgrade to IPA) and I get involved in some AP/MA issues as well but I don't have access AP/MA setup screens. We have an HRIS Manager who has a staff of 3 handling benefits admin, talent management, and other HR things. We have a couple accountants in Finance that control the GL and other financial setups and testing. I wish we had a FT ProcessFlow admin/expert. I know we're not fully leveraging Lawson's ability to automate some processes. We also rely on consultants for major upgrades and new module implementations.

We have around 50 employees and are using RecruitBPM, HR, and Finance additional applicant tracking suites. We do have IT admin and they are also taking care of Lawson. We have an HRIS staffing Manager who has a staff of 20 handling benefits admin, talent management, and other HR things. We trust on our consultants for foremost advancements and new module implementations.

If this off topic i can start another thread....

Regarding staffing. Are most Lawson administrators at the IT level or are we seeing administrators in Finance or HR?
Also, are there opportunities to combine resource roles.
So maybe 3 total resources

- FIN/Security
-HR/IPA
- Design Studio/Interfaces

Not sure but maybe there is a white paper on recommended staffing someone could point me to.

It all depends on what you call sys admin and whether you use managed services/outsource. I have been at one employer who felt that the sys admin role should be in GL. The reason was separation of duties, and we did not run the full GL module in Lawson. Since security and setting up jobs and schedules are part of sys admin as defined by Lawson, those areas had to be done by a non-IT area. I have seen it work OK if the functional areas are technically savvy or security is defined with few conditional rules. I remember one of our accountants in GL ran a stoplaw to see what it did in the middle of the day. Other sys admin functions as defined by Lawson were done by IT, but they weren't called sys admin. They were called server administration and code migration/patching.

what we are seeing is the functional resources are the system administrators across the whole system (including security). Basically one person in HR and one person in FIN have the "Keys to the Kingdom"
This is a managed services setup as well.

There are several perceived challenges;

- The resources wear many "hats" so separation of ERP support and functional (HR or FIN) support roles can be hard to decipher. This does present some issues where an example may be the resources just "do" work as opposed to support from an Enterprise perspective and establish sustainable best practices and processes.

-Resource managers in FIN and HR are not ERP or even Application/System/IT experienced and not equipped to manage resources doing technology jobs.

-With no management oversight or a structured (and strategic) support model of the ERP, the system has followed a very informal (chaotic) support history. Version life-cycles not managed resulting in unsupported applications , zero attention (or available time) to address innovation or enhancements to support business needs or challenges. Lack of a documented security model. Tons of manual work for interfaces and reports where automation could be leveraged.


I would expect a support model could be set up where IT was accountable to provide services (including managing the managed services provider) and the functional resources could be setup in support roles as SME's/Power users.

Thoughts?