Client - Boulder Valley School District

Assignment - Boulder Valley School District purchased Lawson Software through Pearson Digital Learning prior to Pearson's strategic refocus that ended their Lawson partnership. Since implementation had not yet begun at Boulder Valley, JAT, a seasoned Lawson partner, was retained to implement the Lawson Finance, Procurement and Human Resource/Payroll suites at this 28,000-student district.

Challenge - Working closely with the Boulder Valley team, JAT faced a number of challenges including:

The Boulder Valley HR team had less availability to assist with the implementation than was projected due to last-minute labor contract negotiations.

An examination of the district's business needs analysis uncovered the requirement for several customizations, including screens and several reports.

The conversion effort was quite large. It included 7,000 account numbers, seven years of history, seven million general ledger transactions, 5,000 employees, approximately 6,000 employee contracts, 11,000 vendors and 3,000 inventory items.

Boulder Valley staff was hesitant to change processes, which is typical with many new financial system implementations.

Solution - JAT's team effort and K-12 experience throughout the Conference Room Pilot (CRP) and System Test phases of the project assured a successful implementation. The JAT project manager was able to bring additional consultants to the project to backfill gaps, make recommendations and contribute to the project's success. JAT was able to respond quickly to the customization requirements and easily convert the large amount of data required to begin using the Lawson software.

Results - JAT's perseverance and experience combined with the efforts of Boulder Valley's key staff, enabled the district to go live with Finance and Procurement, including the requested custom screens and reports, in an accelerated six-month time frame - HR/Payroll in nine months! Both projects were implemented concurrently.

"I can tell you personally that in all my experience, JAT as an implementer along with the Lawson Team, are by far the best I have seen in my 25 years of public service. I have been through many implementations, including PeopleSoft, and have never had a project go as well as this one. The support from both groups has been incredible - again, unlike I ever thought possible in a product as well as an implementer."
Robert Hammond - Chief Operations Officer

Back to Case Study Home