Infor Supply Chain Management vs. Sisense

For any company that creates purchase orders to receive parts, inventory, or any type of order, Lawson Supply Chain Management is a great tool to help automate the ability to approve and reject orders and allows users to be able to track orders much quicker. Typical types of customers that can benefit are hospitals, retail, and the public sector to name a few.

Incentivized

I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.

Incentivized

• Automation approval flow is by far the best feature as it allows a user to set their own checkpoints and users to approve and reject orders.
• Being able to track and find orders in the system makes it a robust application to allow for quicker delivery and receipt of POs. At the same time it helps vendors get paid quicker since everything can be tracked quicker.
• User interface built for end users who do not go into Lawson everyday. This interface shows only what a requester would require to place an order similar to Amazon.

Incentivized

• Customization - lots of supported and community plugins available. Users can also adjust the look and feel through JavaScript.
• Innovation - Sisense is continuing to push the envelope by developing new features through Sisense Labs.
• Customer support - the commitment to excellent customer service and ensuring organizations get the most out of their investment.

Incentivized

• The User Interface that everyday SCM users access is out of date and needs updating. Luckily in version XI the entire user experience is being enhanced to fix this issue.
• Tracking of POs and Receipts and invoices are difficult for end users to research. They usually would require lawson access and/or need to get a buyer involved. Luckily there are third party companies that built add-ons for lawson to allow end users to track this info.
• Out of the box reporting doesn't have a great look to it. Many folks from finance do not like the appearance of the reports. Again Lawson has finally listened and now allows users to customize the look of those reports.

Incentivized

• The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
• Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
• If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.

I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.

New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail

There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.

SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.

SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.

Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.

Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.

Remember to migrate the plugins. The documentation however is pretty straight forward.

Lawson SCM has been the leader in the space for a while. All of the new competitors don't have enough experience or enough customers to fully understand the needs of our company. Lawson continues to work with their customers for ideas on new enhancements and is evident in the latest offering with a redesign of how SCM makes it easier to track and automate the SCM part of the business

Incentivized

1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.

2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.

Product is quite easily scalable. The whole installation can be easily moved to stronger machine if needed.

• As a customer of the tool it allowed for quicker responses when issues came up. It allowed for quick feedback and issue resolution since everything could be tracked.
• The ability to add images into the application allows for better use of the tool as both buyers, vendors, and the AP Department can gain advantages from the built in imaging allowed for users.
• Approval flows allows for custom tailoring for what kind of expense goes to which people for approval. This makes getting orders approved easier and more concise.

Incentivized

• Report development time is reduced from 2~3 days to 2~3 hours.
• Report querying time is improved from 0.5~10 mins to 2~30 seconds.
• A 2-staff team delivers 10 times the BI output that we did on the old system.
• We were able to deliver BI and data analysis for all business functions instead of a very limited group of users