Roles

In the Resource Management system, a role is a set of access rights that a user has to the system. You create roles based on the jobs that users perform at your site and then assign a role to a user. This is a much more efficient way to assign access rights to users, particularly in systems with many users.

Users can, and typically do, have multiple roles. Suppose your company licenses the Lawson Employee Self-Service (ESS) and Manager Self-Service (MSS) applications. All employees use ESS to update their personal information. All managers use MSS to track information about their direct reports. In a role that you create for all employees, you would include access to ESS. In a role that you create for managers, you would include MSS. In addition to ESS and, for managers, MSS, all employees would be assigned to job-specific roles they need.

Here's a simple example. Suppose a new employee joins your company to work as an accounts payable clerk. This person would be assigned the ESS role and a role specific to her job called AP Clerk. Suppose further that a new manager of accounts payable joins your company. This user would be assigned the roles ESS, MSS, AP Clerk, and another role called AP Manager.

The example also shows how inheritance works. Typically, when you create a role like AP Manager, you will want it to have all the rights of AP Clerk plus some additional access. You could, for example, create your AP Clerk role first. Then, when you create AP Manager, specify AP Clerk as the role it inherits from. AP Manager will then automatically have all the rights that AP Clerk does and you just need to modify it to add the additional access rights.

Determining the roles that are needed at your site and configuring them is an important setup procedure for Lawson Security. Typically, your Lawson implementation consultant works with you to determine the roles you need.