"Monarch easily mines data from our Lawson ERP reports. Any report from any Lawson module can be run to a print file, opened in Monarch, and the data can be mined without programming. We can then sort, filter, or otherwise customize the data as we like, and export the data anytime to Excel, Access and more."

 

Monarch Easily Mines Complex Inventory Data from Lawson Reports

Norton Healthcare is Kentucky's largest health care provider with more than 40 locations throughout the region, including five hospitals and seven immediate care centers in the Louisville area, dedicated to setting the standard in health care for the region. The not-for-profit healthcare organization has found Monarch report mining software to set the standard as the simplest yet powerful solution to easily access, analyze and export data from its Lawson for Healthcare ERP system.

"Monarch easily mines data from our Lawson ERP reports," says Karl Danielson, Divisional Director of Material Management for Norton Healthcare. "Any report from any Lawson module can be run to a print file, opened in Monarch, and the data can be mined without programming. We can then sort, filter, or otherwise customize the data as we like, and export the data anytime to Excel, Access and more."

"Monarch gives us full access to specialized calculations, produced by the Lawson system, which are virtually impossible to obtain using any other business intelligence (BI) tool."

MONARCH PROVIDES POWERFUL DATA CONVERSION

A longtime Monarch user, Karl introduced his Norton Healthcare colleagues to Monarch shortly after he joined the organization. "At that time, we were going through a system conversion, to migrate from our legacy ESI (HBOC) material management information system, into a new Lawson system," Karl says. "Our legacy system utilized proprietary databases; there was no automatic way to export data from our legacy systems."

"But, Monarch greatly helped that process: I used Monarch to mine data from legacy ESI reports and export needed data as CSV files. We then used these CSV files to import master file data into the new Lawson system."

"Without Monarch," says Karl, "we would have had to manually re-key most of our existing legacy data into the Lawson system! This would have included our item master and vendor master data; 40,000 and 80,000 records, respectively! Instead, Monarch mined this and other data from our legacy system reports, and exported the data into a Lawson-friendly format for data import."

"Right out of the box, our first copy of Monarch paid for itself many, many times over!"

MONARCH PROVIDES EASY, EVERYDAY DATA ACCESS

Karl and many other colleagues at Norton Healthcare now use Monarch on an ongoing basis to quickly access to needed Lawson data, without programming. "We use Monarch routinely to mine data from Lawson reports, particularly reports with complex multi-line detail data," Karl says. "Monarch mines and consolidates data appearing on multiple lines on the report, into a single line in Monarch's data table. Any multi-line Lawson report can be transformed into a mini-database, using Monarch."

Karl uses Monarch to mine and analyze data from a wide variety of Lawson ERP modules. "For example," Karl says, "I mine data from our 1099 report from our Accounts Payable module to identify invoices which should not be included on a vendor's 1099. Using Monarch, I can create a spreadsheet containing only the data requiring corrections, and then upload the corrected data back into the Lawson system. Without Monarch, these corrections would be a manual process."

"Monarch fully leverages our existing Lawson investment to provide access to all Lawson-generated data, including complex report-based calculations, without programming," Karl says. "I can't imagine working without it."

Monarch also enables precise actual versus budget expenditures for improved budgeting. "We created a customized history report in Lawson, containing purchases and inventory receipts by cost center, by month," says Karl. "We then mine the data from this customized report using Monarch, and export the data to multiple Access databases for later use."

"It would be nearly impossible to access this same data directly from our Lawson production database using a report writer or BI tool," Karl adds. "The data appears in multiple Lawson tables, some with rows numbering in the millions! A report writer or BI tool trying to access these tables would slow the entire system down to a crawl. Monarch accomplishes the same data access by mining data from the reports, not the original database."

"Thanks to Monarch, our Lawson system performance is not compromised, and we can deliver historical data to each cost center manager for budgeting and expense management."

MONARCH ACCESSES DATA NOT OTHERWISE ACCESSIBLE

It may surprise some IT managers that Monarch can access certain ERP data which far more powerful (and expensive and complex) business intelligence tools cannot access. But, as Karl explains, it's true!

"Many of our reports contain complex, conditional calculations generated by the Lawson system itself," Karl says. "For example, our Inventory Turns report includes layers of complex FIFO (First In First Out) inventory calculations. Our Inventory Valuations report and Inventory Received/Not Invoiced report also contain many complex calculations."

"These complex calculations are generated by the Lawson system when the report is run; they do not exist as actual data within the Lawson database. As a result, it would be virtually impossible to replicate the same Lawson calculations using a BI tool or report writer."

"Fortunately, Monarch's report mining capabilities make working with such complex, conditional calculations a snap. Monarch easily mines the data from these reports, including all the complex calculations created by the Lawson system, which appear on the reports. Managers and workers get detailed inventory and other data immediately, with no reporting hassles and no need to burden the IT department with a new report programming tasks!"

Monarch use continues to expand at Norton Healthcare, as a powerful, yet noninvasive data access and analysis solution, mining data from Lawson reports quickly and easily. "Monarch fully leverages our existing Lawson investment to provide access to all Lawson-generated data, including complex report-based calculations, without programming," Karl says. "I can't imagine working without it."

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