LBI as an enterprise solution

Some use LBI as their enterprise reporting solution and others use SAP/ Business Objects Enterprise. LBI is built using only the RAS server so the job server, page server and other services that really make the solution scalable aren't available. That being said, you can really bog down a server really quickly trying to run a lot on LBI especially if the report developers aren't doing everything they can to make the queries lean and efficient. I have a client in particular that does use Lawson, Cerner, McKesson and EPIC and they don't use LBI at all - they use Enterprise. I'd highly recommend to my clients that they use Enterprise if their deployment is large or complex; it's far more scalable and far less complex to administer. I only have one "large" client that uses LBI exclusively and it's painful - every other Lawson client I have runs at a minimum CR Server.

Thanks - good information.

David,
We had meetings here about 2 years ago to discuss our options and what was available to us in-house. We found Cerner had their reporting tools integrated in the App, we purchased Sorian Patient Financials that has its own data cubes and reporting package with it, then you have Lawson LBI and Microsoft Reporting Services and a whole data warehousing group. Unless you make the determination to pick one tool that covers all apps as a corporate direction, it will be tough to sell people who only access Cerner or Sorian to sign into another app like Lawson/LBI just for reporting.

We have integrated smaller apps like ImageNow and to some extent Kronos but not to the level you are talking about with an enterprise solution.

Being a hospital we have EPIC as our clinical system and lawson as our non-clinical systems. For years now we have been talking about integrating Lawson and our clinical systems but EPIC has clarity and Lawson's main system for reporting and distributing is LBI. Both run on crystal reports but integrating the 2 huge systems would mean to have a whole department on datawarehosuing as well a tool for ETL which we feel is a big endeavour in place.

We also used trendstar and are now moving in the direction of Avega which is our decision support system which will get feeds from both systems.

This recent CUE we were introduced to Lawson's solution for datawarehousing which is BPW. This is a tool that has been present in the M3 lawson side for 10 years but just now getting introduced on the S3 side. Looking at the capabilities of what this tool can do is awesome and we came back very impressed. However we want to give this tool more time to get mature and also more robust for S3. This tool promises integration of both systems.

However we visualize greater effort involved with integrating and a datawarehousing solution for both systems.

We have integrated various smaller systems and looking to integrate kronos in LBI which we said has helped in the past.

We are using LBI to publish and distribute reports from Lawson, Cerner, API (our timekeeping system), ProWatch (Our badge and ID system), Meditech, MS Access, and a whole list of other SQL databases that we've developed in-house to over 5,000 employees.

Most of our users are our Managers and we have approx 500 of them here. It can get tricky to schedule the reports and our users are not really good about making sure that they write lean and efficient code, but it does seem to be fairly stable now. We've had a version or two that were TERRIBLE. Lawson is getting better, though.

You can always add another RAS server to the mix as well to distribute the load. Something that we probably SHOULD do, but haven't.