Upcoming decision on Lawson S3

Hi Jolene,

We were using Lawson 10 and went through an implementation to switch to CloudSuite. Prior to CloudSuite implementation, our Lawson was in a Single-Tenant environment hosted by Infor. It took about 16 months to move to CloudSuite (Multi-Tenant) and we moved everything except S3 Payroll. The S3 Payroll module was left in Single-Tenant (Lawson 10) and we call this a "hybrid solution". We had to build interfaces between Multi-Tenant HR/Workforce Management to the Single-Tenant S3 Payroll. The overall implementation required a lot of work from Infor contractors (we used Infor contractors...not 3rd party) and our in-house team as well. We had a lot of issues after Go Live (no one is ever 100% ready) and are still resolving issues 8 months after Go Live. We plan to move the S3 Payroll module to Multi-Tenant as a follow-on project so that our entire system will be Multi-Tenant.

David

Hi Jolene,
We recently started an RFP and are currently On Prem Infor S3 on Unix.
While our leadership has not made the final decision on how we will proceed I can tell you we met with Infor, Oracle, and WorkDay. During the 2 weeks where they provided my company the ability to see their products in action and answer our questions about how the migration to a hosted environment would take place we were shocked at how unprepared Oracle was and we assume it was because it was during their yearly forum.
Work Day seemed to have made a better impression than Infor but only slightly and i believe it was due to folks at my company already having a predisposition to leaving Infor.
I personally believe it would cost my company much more to switch to a new ERP like WorkDay but mainly because we would still be required to keep our On Prem Instance for at least 7 years (or more depending on laws) and I tried to explain that to my company but so far they have not made a decision between Infor or WorkDay.
I have been told by WorkDay folks that no matter how large our company grows after go-live we will not be charged more money for the size of our DATA! I found that incomprehensible. I can get into the details of the explanation they provided if needed but I almost wish we would go with them just so i can see if that's true!
I think our current PROD db is about 3 terabytes in our Oracle RAC system and we have that synced to a DR site as well as a read only copy for users to run crystal and queries.
I can also tell you that i worked in the past as a consultant helping companies go from on prem to Cloud Suite and the companies i helped went live with little to no issues in an average of 16 months time.
I have also had to help some companies out after go live and i think it really depends on who you get as your PM.
One company i helped setup on prem S3 in read only and went to a new ERP so they wanted some help in a managed services capacity where their read only copy would sometimes require a restart or maybe they needed to create some new LBI report or something to get at the data inside of S3.
Infor may have some issues but I feel like if you are in a Health Care environment with supply chain then you really need to sit down with any other vendors to have them show you if their product can actually do what your require!
I can tell you that we just did that a few months ago and Oracle and Work Day were the only others we considered and I would say that the feed back i received from my company is WorkDay actually had a better presentation and they checked all the boxes but being an Infor admin for 23 years I was skeptical and biased toward Infor. So i forced myself to be open and i just think that if an ERP is hosted then i would assume the largest cost would be hosting the data and how many tickets they open with your help desk. I just find it hard to believe WorkDay would not charge more if our db went from 1TB to 3 TB over a period of a few years. they claim its not in an RMDBS anymore and the model is proprietary. So they can not even provide a name that is industry standard! Something about being in a "Data Lake" and while i understand that topic i do not understand how its not using MS SQL, Oracle, or DB2???
If anyone has a better handle on how they can make those statements i would love to know :)
Bottom line - we are S3 on Unix and Windows for Landmark - we have LBI, MSCM, XM, Infor OS, and prety much all the modules Infor offers and this decision to go to Cloud Suite or another vendor is going to take a few more months so if you are a big company consider all of your interfaces (document them in great detail before you meet with vendors) and know how your supply chain is currently being handled because switching from Infor to another vendor would be a big deal if they cannot handle the same processes. WorkDay seemed to have the answers but I can not say i have gone thru a migration to WorkDay. I believe my company asked them to provide some folks to be a reference but so far my company has not asked me to join a conversation with them so i can not be sure if anyone has yet.
If we stick with Infor I believe it would save us having to keep the old system up because the data would be migrated into the CS system.
As far as i know there is no way to simply export our data from a point in time that would satisfy any legal requirements since the current v10 S3 system needs the app to be up to query the data and a simple DB dump or even just keeping the DB up without the app servers will not work!
If anyone knows of any S3 customer that found a way to dump the data so they do not require the application to be up I would LOVE to know how! :)
Hope this helps!

;)

Good morning David,

Thank you for your reply. Are you leveraging Cloudsuite HR solely or do you have the Finance and Supply Chain or other products as well? Were you able to convert all your data to Cloudsuite from Lawson v10? Are you finding any limitations from being in Multi-Tenant? Would love to hear more about your experience and what type of issues you ran into. We are currently looking at the CloudSuite Distribution product, but will need to understand more about FSM and HR potentially as well.

Thanks,
Jolene

Good morning Jim,

Thank you so much for the response. We are currently in the process of looking at different companies and doing demos to hopefully get to our short list of those we want to evaluate further. We are also very much interested in the data conversation and how much data can be migrated to Cloudsuite vs being stored in the data lake. Which all products are you currently considering with Infor?

I agree, I would be shocked that there is no cost for data/storage as your db size grows over time, but it may be within their infrastructure that allows that growth.

I appreciate knowing the average time to implement is 16 months as we also have many integrations and processes that will be impacted by any new software due to the variety in our business.

Would love to hear more about what type of features are encouraging your company to lean toward Workday vs Infor.

Thanks so much,
Jolene

Hello Jolene,

My company underwent the same process Jim is going through about 2 years ago. We are on premise Windows, SQL. We shared some of the same experiences with Oracle, Infor and Workday. In the end, we decided to go with Workday. We started a 15 month implementation plan. We go live in March. We are converting some data to Workday, between 1 and 5 years worth depending on the data type, other data will be kept in Workday's data lake, Prism. We will also keep a copy of the data in our data warehouse.

We have about 140 integrations in Lawson and that will grow to about 160 with Workday. This is a big effort and was prepared for before the start of the project.

I can't comment on cost because I was not involved in the negotiations of the contract.

Hi Adam,

Thank you so much for your response. Can you share what some of the key features/limitations that caused you to pick one solution over another? Did you leverage a full RFP process to do your evaluation? Are you implementing full Financials and HR?

Thanks,
Jolene

Hi Joleen!
We have the full suite of products from Infor AP, BN, PR as well as InforOS, LBI, MSCM, XM, and Landmark mostly for IPA (we had a bad project for GHR and it seems to have tainted peoples impression of Infor)
I was not working here when it was stopped but I believe it ended up being a performance problem on our end, I went to our data center and found the new servers were still connected to the old SAN -
So after new HBA cards were installed we did end up migrating to the new servers and upgraded as much as we could at the time.
I will not dwell on the negative comments but I can say that health Care and SCM seem to be better on Infor because we know it but the folks from Oracle and WorkDay showed a lab environment and they were saying things like you can do it all from your phone.
Its hard to see how a system will perform with only 1 user on it.
You asked if we did a full RFP and I can say we had about 100 of our users at KPMG who is an excellent choice for a neutral 3rd party vendor to help you with an RFP.
They had a nice facility and actually had folks who have worked with companies to migrate from one vendor to another.
Its nice when u get an unbiased opinion, I was told even if we switched we would all get trained on the new product.
I am ok with it either way but if it were my Nichol I would stay on Infor in Cloud Suite.
My personal concerns would be "does my company really need me after they are on CS?"
And if they went to another vendor do i really want to start over from scratch on Oracle or WorkDay?
Personally i like to learn new things, but i guess each person is different.
Hope this helps!
It turned out to be a bigger project than I thought because i am used to coming into a project after the contract is signed and bailing out folks who are stuck!
I heard we will be making a decision in about 2 months...so i will check back in when i know who the execs decide on!
Let me know if I can more details, good luck!

Joleen, I would have preferred a neutral third party do our RFP. The decision was made by management without significant input by IS. Officially it was called a RFP, but it was not a full one in my opinion.

Several decisions by Infor impacted the decision. The last was the ASC842 decision which forced us to implement new software at the last minute after Infor kept assuring us they would have a working product. That poisoned Finance against Infor. HR also did not have a high opinion of Infor. SCM didn't really care one way or another.

some factors that went into the decision were the ability to easily extract data without relying on IS and the elimination of third party software.

From what I heard the presentations by Workday were superior to the Infor presentations. They were more slick and seemed more put together than the Infor presentations.

We are implementing HCM, FIN and SCM. It's a very aggressive time frame. We are replacing third party vendors for Benefits and onboarding plus implementing expense management.

If you want to talk more just let me know and we can set up a call.

MHS also went through the full RFP process and are going from on prem v10 Lawson to Workday. Infor's price tag and the fact that CloudSuite is so different it requires an implementation project triggered an RFP by policy. HR and IT voted strongly for Workday. SCM is a little light in Workday, but we're working through it now and using the opportunity to change some P&P.

I was part of the RFP. Workday is much prettier than Infor and has more of a website experience leading most of it to be more 'intuitive' for our users used to doing things online. Function wise, SCM and Contracts are more robust in Info and Oracle (the other contender for RFP) but the basics work well in Workday and there's a very vocal community and their brainstorms are moving quickly into releases.

Thank you Kat for your response. It does seem that Workday is a popular choice. We are working with several now to try to narrow down the selections so we will see how it all plays out.

Good afternoon Kat,

I just wanted to follow up and see how things were going. Are you still happy with your choice? Are there things you would consider doing differently now? 

Thanks Much,

Jolene

Hi Jim,

I just wanted to follow up and see how the decision making process worked out. Would you mind sharing which vendor was selected and why? We are just starting our RFP process and appreciate the information. 

 

Thanks much,

Jolene

Hi Jolene! It's ... going!  

Our go live timeline is 18 months.  We kicked off June 2022, Go Live is January 2024. Workday is requiring all its healthcare clients work with a partner implementation consultant firm - we're using KPMG.  High level the phases are Discover, Global Design, Unit Testing, End to End/Integration Configuration, Parallel Testing, Gold Build/Go Live.

We are at the very tail end of End to End/Integration Configuration and as a result, I'm so deep in the weeds that it all feels either really bad or fantastic and it changes hourly depending on which meeting I'm in!   

PMOs are happy with the progress and we're apparently still on track for our go live date.  Workday is very new from a SCM side so while we find some things limiting compared to Lawson customization, it is an opportunity to "get back to basics" and enforce that the correct users have access to things.  

For example - as one of the ones maintaining the item master, I am going to miss Add-Ins/Uploads and the ability to just run a sql query. It's mitigated by Workday's ability to route changes for approval, so if someone is asking for a change, we can design the request to grab what I would have from sql and incorporate it on the screen.  

Some of it is cloud-based so it's possible Infor Cloudsuite can do some of the things as well - for example, we pull data and use GHX powersourcing to look for things to clean.  I'd run a sql for it in v10 Lawson but GHX Data Connect has it live, so I can see the item master either in Workday or GHX and what I change in one goes to the other.  Haven't seen it yet, but contracts has something similar.

We're beginning to discuss cutover timelines and tasks and beginning to design training materials and calendars and omg it's only 24 weeks to get all this done and I'm going to go get more coffee now.. 

Kat V.
We are SOOO going to miss you!

John