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LBI dashboards are useful for delegating reports to specific access and is essentially a frontend for all your user reporting needs.

For this part in the series, we will be going over the very basics and how to create a dashboard tab for Finance users and setup access so those users can access the dashboard.

1. First login into LBI environment as an admin user.
2. In the top right next to your admins username, you’ll see a gear wheel, click that and select “New Dashboard Tab”
   
3. Enter a dashboard title and click OK, ours will be named Finance
4. You should be redirected to a blank Dasboard, on your new dashboard, click the + sign in the top left and select “EDIT” (note you can select ‘Set Access’ but it’s simpler to go to edit)
   
   
5. A new menu should pop-up with multiple tabs. Go to Sharing and select Edit Viewers for specific access
   
6. In this screen you should see a set of users and groups (roles). In LSA, if users have specific groups assigned to their users, adding here will give them access to this dashboard. For our example we will be adding LBI-Payroll group from Lawson:
   
7. All users with LBI-Payroll group will now have access to this dashboard. Press okay and Save:
   

This is the first step in setting up an LBI dashboard for specific users. Please note that LBI comes with a default role that all users must have which is typically called something like LBIUSER. Example below for this article:

Lawson allows for requester users to submit requisition orders for their organization. To make sure the orders are valid, Lawson also supports approvers to verify and approve/reject the orders.

The core of this is done by setting up Requisition Locations (RQ01) and Requisition Strings (RQ02) and having a workflow process everything in between.

Requisition Strings can be used in many different ways, but in our example it is to have individual approvers approve for a particular location. This can also be general titles like Manager, VP, etc. or however your organization wants to set it up.

As you can see below, these are strings for Company 100, Requesting Location RQ210 with Approvers starting at Level4 and stopping at Level6. The lower limit on the left is the amount that the users approve orders for and depending on the IPA flow logic, could notify or skip them.

When users track requsitions in say RQ10 for example, they can drill around and see history log via the strings themselves:

This is only half the setup for this particular organization.

 

Approvers have to be setup on the Landmark side via Rich Client or Process Server Administrator web application. This is done via “Filters” and these have to be named accordingly to what your IPA Requisition flow will coincide with.

Below is an example of how we would mirror the RQ02 strings in Rich Client (custom report).

The Level 4, 5, and 6 are the “auth id” that our custom flow matches up on. It then grabs the user from Landmark and send notifications based on where the requisition is in the flow.

Some organizations simply don’t use RQ02 strings as they may find it easier to process everything on the Landmark side.  Landmark does have a set of its own reporting tools and filters (See my other article titled “Generating a simple approval level report from the Landmark database“ for a custom database report I created).

The benefits of RQ02 strings in my experience is that the frontend functional users could setup the strings for the developers to mirror in the back end (or by an automated process if done right).

 

Hope this was helpful in giving you a brief overview of requisitions and approvers.

Lawson natively supports requisitions and a hierarchy requisition approval system within organizations. Some use both the approval strings found in RQ02 and setup filters within Lawson Rich Client (An application in Lawson Landmark). More info on this can be found in another one of our articles titled: “A Brief Overview into the Lawson Requisition and Approval Process”

 

To generate a database dump of all approvers and their levels using my method, you’ll need read access rights to the LSL, IPA, and GEN databases and must be using SQL.

 

1. 1. Login to your TEST or PROD database application.
   2. Create a new query window and paste the below SQL code in, one is a screenshot to show syntax highlights and the other is the raw code for your convenience.
      
      
      Run the query and your results should show as so:
      
   3. Copy and paste with headers into Excel to filter down the data or edit the query.

I’ve included an Active Status to show which locations are active or inactive. This can be changed in RQ01 per company and location.

Feel free to optimize the query to your likings if you see any inefficiencies. Remember, this is only for approval levels on the landmark side, not the RQ02 strings themselves.