SAN DIEGO — In a bid to more effectively address the industry-specific requirements of manufacturers and other customers and to compete with SAP and Oracle, Lawson Software in June will implement an organizational restructuring that, for the most part, replaces geographic regions with vertical industry-focused groups.
“Our customers want industry-specific solutions,” said Lawson CEO Harry Debes in an address this week at the company’s annual CUE customer conference here. “Now customers will be working with people who know their industries. This approach will be much better for our customers.”
The move is consistent with efforts by Lawson competitors such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft to add more industry-specific focus and functionality to their applications and services. It is also in line with Lawson’s recent strategy to focus its resources on a few vertical industries that fit well with its software. In manufacturing, Lawson has chosen to focus its efforts specifically on food and beverage, fashion, and the equipment services, management, and rental (ESM&R) markets.
While its competitors have augmented traditional product- and geographic-centric organizations with vertical industry overlays, Lawson is going a bit further. The company, Debes said, is creating industry-focused business units with general managers who will have profit-and-loss responsibility as well as dedicated sales, services, marketing, and research and development teams. Industry-focused general managers also will have responsibility for striking industry partnerships with integration and other vendors.
Industry-focused business units will cover fashion, food/beverage, ESM&R, healthcare, and public sector verticals. In addition, Lawson will retain some regionally focused business units and some units that serve multiple industries with a horizontal product. Regional business units will continue in Latin America and Asia/Pacific. Horizontal, product-oriented business units will include Lawson’s recently launched human capital management product suite. That group will sell Lawson’s HCM suite directly to customers and through Lawson’s industry-specific business units.
While acknowledging that the new organizational structure will mean some shifting of responsibility and authority — particularly away from regional country managers — Debes predicted a fairly smooth transition. That’s because the transition has been discussed internally for the past two years, he told Managing Automation in an interview.
New industry-focused business units, Debes said, will have responsibility for developing multi-year roadmaps for their industries and products. As part of that process, he said, those managers will identify industry requirements and functional gaps that may exist in the Lawson product line. They will be responsible for filling those gaps, either through internal development or acquisition.
Currently, for example, Lawson, without its own full-featured warehouse management product, is partnering with best-of-breed vendors. “At some point, we will have to make a make-or-buy decision,” Debes said.
Lawson customers said they were pleased with the new, vertically focused organizational structure, although, in some cases, they may end up receiving support services from Lawson experts who are not local.
“That’s not a problem for us,” said W. Pat Harris, chief financial officer at Augusta Sportswear Group, a clothing manufacturer and Lawson M3 customer. “We already get a lot of support remotely through e-mail, so it’s something we’ve become accustomed to,” she said.