New Online Tool from Lawson to Help Fashion Companies Improve Collaboration with Suppliers

Lawson Supplier Portal among latest Fashion-specific offerings from Lawson Software.

ST. PAUL, Minn - Lawson Software has announced the release of Lawson M3 Supplier Portal, a new web-based application that helps fashion companies collaborate better with their suppliers when purchasing goods. Lawson M3 Supplier Portal was designed to provide rapid deployment, simpler use and rapid return on investment.

Lawson M3 Supplier Portal was created for fashion sourcing companies as well as fashion manufacturers. It offers online access to key information, including order tracking and delivery data. It helps improve collaboration between a fashion company and its suppliers, because both sides of a transaction can view and update the same data. This functionality helps eliminate time lags, duplicate work and the risk of errors. The system also helps reduce manual activities and streamline processes by creating automatic confirmation of order quantities, dates and prices. In addition, it can create delivery notes, which also helps to reduce manual processes such as faxing, emailing and managing multiple spreadsheets.

The new solution has been designed with Lawson's 'simpler is better' concept in mind, so it contains the key functionality that supplying companies need, managed through an intuitive user interface. And, since it is delivered via the Web, it does not require on-site installation.

Lawson M3 Supplier Portal offers a cost effective alternative to other electronic data interchange (EDI) offerings. Lawson Supplier Portal can be deployed in a matter of days for a fashion company - and individual suppliers can be brought online with relative ease at a low cost. This also helps keep costs down for smaller suppliers using the system, as opposed to other options such as EDI, which may be cost prohibitive. Since many fashion companies use a large number of suppliers, Lawson Supplier Portal can help improve efficiency by promoting greater collaboration between the fashion company and its network of suppliers.

"Lawson Supplier Portal offers exciting new possibilities for meaningful improvements in efficiency and data accuracy," said Frédéric Champalbert, general manager, Fashion, for Lawson. "Supplier Portal works directly with our full Lawson for Fashion business software system, helping to reduce the cost of deployment and long-term cost of ownership."

Lawson is offering this new solution as a module with a cost-per-user license and no additional charge for individual transactions. This means customers using Lawson M3 Supplier Portal do not need to budget for additional cost if their order volumes increase, which may be the case with some other collaborative systems on the market.