Asset Management Module - General feedback

From my experience, overall most asset management programs provide the same general options/features in terms of Depreciation Calculations, reporting, inventory. One advanteage of using Lawson with the other modules is the use of asset templates to help automate the flow from PO/AP to AM using the functionality built in to capitalize these withouth having to key all of the data elements. Look up the asset capitalization (AM115) process from PO, AP, AC.

The key thing with implementing asset management in my opinion is the conversion files. The conversion is 3 files Asset, Book and Items. All must be in synch to get the asset to load. You will also want to validate that the book value, YTD depreciation and Life to date depreciation are balanced. Once converted, I would schedule a test run with depreciation and validate the options for how to handle differences in the calculation in your current system vs what asset management will calculate. Also how to handle differences, there is options for catching up depreciation/recalculating depreciation that I would spend some time validating your process through the project.

Good morning, unless you're planning on converting all of the depreciation transaction history, you may want to look at the AM320/AM501 jobs, as well. Dave

...adding to the previous comment...the major issue I have faced in past implementations is the actual conversion of YTD and LTD depreciation. If your data is incorrect, Lawson will want to fix these values so that it can caluculate the correct depreciation for each period going forward. In Lawson, this is called "catch up". Read about this functionality and make sure your staff understand its financial impact. Don't be surprised if you have several assets to tweak post implementation. It can be an iterative process.

The next step is to look at the retired assets, define your book your convention of depreciation. Look at the accounting units where this depreciation needs to go to.

Getting the assets added into Lawson with the acurate life for these assets.

AM580 is the program used to catch up depreciation and the strongest program in asset managment. Be careful and read and understand what the program does before you use this program.

All,
Many thanks for the updates. Some good tips in here. Can i check a few other things -
(a) How did you find the standard reports which are provided with the module? Were they sufficient or did you had to get external reports (Crystal etc) written to meet the user's requirements

(b) Have you used the module on a multi site instance. We have 31 Hospitals each of which is a separate company which we would need to track the assets of?

(c) We have been told by Lawson that the module has a barcode functionality? Has anyone used this and if so any feedback appreciated

(d) Would you be willing to have a chat with us over your experience (please send me a message with your details and I will try and arrange a conf call at a time suitable with you)

Many thanks in advance

Saurabh

The standard Lawson reports are sufficient and provide all of the information. They are actually very useful and you do not have to write custom reports or external reports.

If you have 31 hospitals depending on your GL structure you do not need 31 companies. You can have a single asset company and your asset locations can be different but tied to your single company. You can use asset templates to get the assets of each location into the asset managment module of Lawson.

The barcode functionality of Lawson does not work well at all.We did investigate this but did not find this to work with what we wanted at that time. But this may have changed depending on the version of application you have installed.

Many thanks for the Update Ruma.

What version are you on? We are on 8.1 MSp5 (its an old version) and the business user had been keen to use the barcode functionality.

we are apps version 9.0.1.6. but the older version functionality were the ones that did not work. I do not know for versions 9.1 and above.

i meant to say 9.0.1.4 apps version