Woodmen Goes Live on Lawson Enterprise Suite, Business Intelligence

Woodmen of the World Woodmen of the World/Omaha Woodmen Life Insurance Society (Omaha, Neb.), a fraternal benefit organization that offers insurance and annuities, has gone live with the Lawson S3 Enterprise Financial Management Suite and Lawson Business Intelligence from Lawson Software (St. Paul, Minn.), according to a Lawson press release. The organization will use the enterprise applications to support long-term growth through core systems consolidation and process automation.

Woodmen of the World members, who belong to more than 2,000 lodges throughout the United States, conduct volunteer, charitable and patriotic projects that benefit individuals, families and communities. The Lawson S3 Financial Management Suite will help Woodmen of the World target growth opportunities and provide a platform for sustainable compliance, the Lawson release asserts. The vendor claims that the enterprise software suite helps improve transparency of a business, strengthens financial discipline, and helps improve business processes and reduce costs. The vendor asserts that Lawson Business Intelligence provides a comprehensive, organization-wide view for decision makers, allowing them to analyze operational processes with up-to-date data, make decisions, and enter those decisions back into operational systems to capitalize on business opportunities.

"We chose Lawson because we wanted a consolidated view of our financial data from one system. We also wanted a system that provided up-to-date reporting capabilities and the potential to grow with our company," says Annette Devine, vice president of Accounting Services Division, Woodmen of the World. "We now have a much more logical account structure along with automated reporting of key data."

Woodmen of the World's deployment was led by a cross-departmental project team with representatives from its human resources, finance, and IT departments. Woodmen of the World, a Lawson customer since 1999, had previously been running Lawson Human Capital Management and Payroll solutions, according to the vendor.

Lawson Professional Services led this latest implementation of the Enterprise Financial Management and Lawson Business Intelligence solutions. The project team utilized Lawson Process Flow Integrator, an application based on a services-oriented architecture, which Lawson claims helps organizations form efficient, integrated business processes. Using Process Flow Integrator, the project teams created 25 interfaces from several legacy information systems to create a more unified view of the organization's information assets.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio