Lawson Software - Vendor Self Service

The purpose of the Lawson Software Vendor Self Service application is to provide a company’s vendors and suppliers information via a self service Web application. Instead of making multiple phone calls to the Accounts Payable and Receiving departments vendors can retrieve payment and receipt of goods information 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world, using a common browser. This is a very good example of the new much hyped e-business paradigm we all hear about.

With no knowledge about their customer’s Accounts Payable system vendors and suppliers can review the status of payments to them from their customers. Questions such as "Has my invoice been scheduled for payment?", "Is my check in the mail?", or "Why did my customer short pay me by ten dollars?" can be answered with a couple of clicks of the mouse. Vendors can also determine if the goods they have shipped to their customer have been received and if the goods are not at the customers receiving dock, where exactly are they? The Lawson Vendor Self Service applications handles these functions and much more.

It is important to note that the check and the endorsed back of the check are not scanned images. These check representations were developed using HTML and data from the Lawson application database. The likeness to a real check makes the application self evident to the user.

The prior state consisted of vendors and suppliers calling their customer to find out the status of the payment to them. Often they called their contact (the person ordering the goods or services), whereby the contact had to call the Accounts Payable department. With the inevitable phone tag these simple requests for information involved three or more people and took a week or more to complete. The standard screen the person in Accounts Payable would eventually use looked like this.

The typical user at a vendor or supplier location would be an Accounts Receivable person, a customer service representative, or someone on the shipping dock. They would have experience with computers and their own systems but of course would have never seen their customers’ systems.

Lawson’s web based self service centers such as Vendor Self Service, Employee Self Service, and Customer Self Service have dramatically reduced phone calls to retrieve information and to enter information. Tasks that took hours or days with multiple phone calls now take seconds and minutes without having to make any phone calls or play phone tag. These are real life examples of e-business. Far flung employees, vendors, and customers can access corporate data using the Internet as a connection. They need only a common browser loaded on their personal computer, and the need for any training has been completely eliminated

A complete screen shot demo of the Lawson Vendor Self Service application can be seen at http://www5.lawson.com/demoware/vendor/intro.htm

Terry Wier, Director Field Development, Advanced Technologies Division
Lawson Software
1300 Godward Street
Mpls, MN 55413
612-379-8086 x4363
terry.wier@lawson.com