The fast-paced world of business technology is always changing, and that means it’s vital for businesses to keep themselves and their company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system up to date. After all, your ERP system doesn’t just handle your most valuable data—it also acts as the engine that keeps your business running, and you’re not going to get very far with an outdated engine.
That’s why many of our Infor Lawson clients have been considering upgrading their Infor Lawson S3 system to Global Human Resources (GHR), CloudSuite Financials (CSF), or even a different ERP system altogether (like Workday). If you’re ready for a system change, you’ll need to know what steps to take to prepare. Read on to learn more about the key areas your company should evaluate and address before moving to a new solution.
Conduct a Formal Security Review
We live in a world of security breaches, compliance concerns, and regulations that span the globe (just think of the impact GDPR has had since it was introduced), so it’s critical to make sure that your security policies are in tip-top shape before you upgrade. That’s why we recommend reviewing all of your system’s current security-related issues and inconsistencies. A formal security review will help you streamline the access employees need to do their jobs efficiently and accurately, as well as reduce risks associated with incorrectly stored or accessible records.
A full audit takes time, but simple things like Inquiry Only access can be granted to improve processes immediately. We also recommend considering Lawson security training for your IT staff, as this will help them not only build whatever new model your new solution requires, it will also ensure that the new model remains applicable as your organization and systems change.
Review and Clean Data
Reliable, consistent data is imperative when preparing to upgrade your system. Not addressing data issues ahead of time will lead to far more manual effort down the road (not to mention directly impact your reporting and processes).
First, review your master record data, making sure that fields are consistently populated, contain data that relates to those fields, and that the data elements are all formatted the same way. As an example, imagine that different people or departments have entered “St. Louis, Missouri” a number of different ways over the years (such as “St Louis, MO,” or “Saint Louis, Missouri,” or “St Louis, MO,” etc.) Having the same city in your records spelled and/or punctuated six different ways can cause a host of problems, especially when that data is sent to other systems, such as vendor files or government reporting.
Our recommended approach to data consistency can be addressed in these three phases: Correct, Maintain, Benefit.
Correct
- Identify low-hanging fruit that’s more easily corrected—such as data that remains in the same field with the same meaning—as these changes shouldn’t overly affect reporting or processes.
- Identify elements located in incorrect fields and determine what steps will be needed to move that data to the correct location. (This step will involve impact analysis and planning to ensure that you don’t cause system harm.)
- Determine formats for critical fields and have the system enforce the rules. For example, employee names must be in all caps or address fields must not have special characters.
- Determine the field of records and remove duplicates from inappropriate locations.
Maintain
- Ensure that security supports data management and governance processes.
- Develop published management and governance processes.
- Task the human resource information system (HRIS) with data management/governance of the data elements.
- Set up ongoing monitoring of key fields by the system and notify HRIS when discrepancies occur.
Benefit
- Tools such as IPA will produce better results, and programming will not be required to address exceptions.
- Reporting and queries will produce correct information without manual scrubbing and user-based filtering of records.
- Formats sent to other systems or locations will be consistent and support formats like HTML.
Learn More About Upgrading Lawson S3
Whether your company is ready to upgrade Lawson S3 right now or in the near future, it’s important to plan ahead, and that’s where our senior-level Infor Lawson consultants come in. Working in the Lawson S3 space for decades has earned them the in-depth knowledge and technical capabilities you’ll need to help you overcome your upgrade-related concerns about legacy data and security.
Let us help you prepare for your organization’s future. Contact us today.
