Lawson Software announced that Buncombe County, North Carolina went live on the latest version of Lawson Strategic Sourcing this month. The application will help move the county along a path to a fully electronic bidding process with suppliers. Numerous suppliers have successfully completed online registration, and all new requests for bids are being posted for suppliers to view and respond to via the Strategic Sourcing Portal.

To achieve its goal of a 100 percent electronic bidding process, Buncombe County uses Strategic Sourcing in conjunction with Lawson Procurement as an electronic platform to standardize and streamline its request for bid process. This solution will help the county shorten its sourcing cycles, improve communication with suppliers regarding open bids, automate the collection and comparison of supplier responses and simplify the overall bid/award process.

“The implementation of Lawson Strategic Sourcing at Buncombe County allows us to take a major step toward our goal for e-government,” said Joy Dalton, purchasing manager for Buncombe County. “Our bidding process will be more efficient for us and our suppliers. Requisition to payment of invoices and reporting on each will now be done in the same financial system. The process will help secure goods and services in an environment of fair and open competition in the best interest of Buncombe County, while operating within the North Carolina purchasing laws and county policies.”

Lawson Strategic Sourcing is the first application developed based on Lawson Landmark technology. Landmark is Lawson’s new technology and application model based on a service oriented architecture (SOA) and is designed to dramatically reduce the time required for application development and implementation. Landmark significantly reduces lines of code and moves Lawson and its customers to entirely open standards technology.

The Strategic Sourcing application expanded the roster of Lawson applications that Buncombe County is using. “We have worked closely with Buncombe County to help ensure that Lawson applications are delivering strategic operational benefits and costs savings,” said Dean Hager, senior vice president of product management for Lawson. “With Strategic Sourcing, we are helping to put the county on a path toward SOA, but we are also delivering immediate benefits by streamlining and automating the county’s sourcing activities. By simplifying our approach to technology solutions, such as Strategic Sourcing, we can enable government organizations to become more efficient and make better use of their scarce resources.”