Advanced ImageNow to Lawson Integration with Yoga Connect™

Join RPI while we discuss advanced ImageNow Lawson integration. Learn about taking your ImageNow Lawson integration to the next level. In Advanced ImageNow, Richard Stout, a Senior Systems Integrations expert, will talk through the benefits of an advanced ImageNow Lawson integration while discussing:

• Using AGS calls to import data directly into Lawson vs. batch programs
• Adding URL attachments to Lawson records
• Live GL coding validation in the eForm with link to GL Master

Britney:
I’m Mrs Britney Zegler, I work for RPI. For any of you that might not be familiar with us, we are a Perceptive Software business partner that has been working within this now for over 10 years. I want to thank you again for taking the time to attend this seminar today.

With us this afternoon we have Richard Stout, a senior systems integration expert at RPI, he does a fantastic job covering this topic, and with that I’ll hand it over to Richard.

Richard:
I’m Richard Stout from RPI Consultants. Today we’re gonna be talking about advanced integration techniques between Lawson, ImageNow. For now, I’m gonna start with a bit of background information about our company. We are an Infor Lawson partner, we’re also a Perceptive Software partner, and as a company we have over 10 years’ experience integrating Lawson and ImageNow.

We have 32 at least, certified Lawson resources on our team. We have our headquarters in beautiful Baltimore Maryland, but we operate in Nashville. Our ImageNow services cover the full gamut, everything from implementation to day-to-day system maintenance, bringing on new lines of business, supporting upgrades, reporting and advanced workload metrics, and obviously the company’s web development and WebNow development which mostly I will talk about that.

So let’s get into our first topic here, and this is an inbound interface to Lawson, we invoice data from ImageNow, and talk about how to bring that in to each one. Well the traditional model, the way they’re most commonly used to bring invoice data into Lawson is to use the AP520 or the MA540 but that’s broken. These run in batch, meaning you’ve got a collection invoices, you schedule this program to run, pick up the invoices and bring it into the system. And they usually operate with exports.

So there’s a number of steps in the traditional invoice interface. And this is perhaps one of the drawbacks, is there’s just so many steps, there’s multiple places where things could go wrong, and multiple places where you need to resolve it. We start with an iScript that is exporting out data from eform, and building a CSV file. The CSV file that needs to be moved from the ImageNow server to the Lawson server. At that point we run the MA540 job which will reboot the CSV file, and that loads records into the conversion table, that is the invoice table, where they automatically sort things. And then invoices are actually created from that.

So, some of the pain points with that model is first off, it’s not real time. You’re not getting it immediate & fast, you have to wait before your invoices get uploaded to Lawson. Exception processing is the thing that’s really difficult, because there’s just so many opportunities for something to break in that <inaudible>. And we’re not able to offer any feedback or to say as to whether or not the script was successful.

Let me focus on the exception handling for a second. There’s a couple of stages that can go wrong here, that you might need to address when interfacing or uploading to Lawson. If you have some data in a field that just doesn’t even have space on it. For example, if you know anything about a company, number, or you’ve got an error sent in a column or you’ve got a character, a field that’s too wide, too many characters in the field. Some of that can cause the MA540