Lawson Signs Multi-Suite Software Contract with North Carolina City; City of High Point Will Use Centralized ERP System to Better Share Information Across Departments and Enhance Reporting

ST. PAUL, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 12, 2006--Lawson Software (Nasdaq:LWSN) signed a multi-suite software contract with the city of High Point, N.C., in Lawson's second quarter of fiscal 2006, which ended Nov. 30, 2005. The city licensed Lawson's Financials, Procurement and Human Resources suites to enhance its reporting capabilities and promote faster decision-making by improving information sharing across departments. Lawson Professional Services will assist the city with the implementation.

High Point, which serves more than 93,000 residents and has more than 1,500 employees, is turning to Lawson to help meet its needs as a growing community. The city currently uses a variety of older business systems.

The city's decision to move to a consolidated Lawson system resulted from an extensive evaluation in conjunction with the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA). Before issuing an RFP, city managers worked with GFOA to analyze the city's communications, customer service, technology, training services and future administrative needs. The flexibility of the Lawson applications and their ability to work with non-Lawson systems were key factors in the city's decision.

"Our staff needed a centralized, automated system in which information could be easily accessed and shared," said Pat Pate, assistant city manager and executive committee chairman, city of High Point. "Lawson provided the best functionality for our long-term needs along with tools and best practices to help us drive business process improvements."

Specifically, the Lawson applications will help the city of High Point improve financial analysis and reporting capabilities, streamline purchasing processes and eliminate errors associated with manual data entry. For example, by using Lawson's Grant Management application to automatically track personnel hours and costs against specific grants, the city will be able to more strategically manage and report on its portfolio of grant programs.

City employees also will be able to manage their own HR information and enroll in benefits online through the Employee and Manager Self-Service application. This will help the city's HR department focus on more strategic activities, such as streamlining benefits administration processes.

"Lawson is committed to helping local governments meet constituent demand for greater efficiency, accountability and transparency," said Ken Munson, Government & Education industry marketing director, Lawson Software. "By offering the lowest total cost of ownership among leading business application vendors, we help enable cities and counties to focus scarce resources on customer service initiatives - not administration."

Lawson serves more than 100 government and education clients, including three of the top six digital state governments and four of the 25 largest school districts in the United States. Lawson's software is in use at almost 3,000 schools with combined enrollments exceeding 1.75 million students and 200,000 staff members. School districts, cities, counties, state governments, publicly owned utilities, municipal districts and membership organizations rely on Lawson's solutions to help meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders - students, constituents, members, employees, vendors and the community - while helping to maximize limited budgets.