SAP Business One as Corporate ERP Extension for Multinational Corporation

If you are expanding internationally it is natural idea to deploy the same Corporate ERP platform for your foreign subsidiary. However there are numerous nuances that you have to consider. First of all foreign country may have its own language and your ERP at the Headquarters might not support this language. This might be minor issue, as your foreign employees are reasonably good in English, or you can even translate the most popular forms and reports. In the foreign countries you may find out that, even business related legislation might be compliant with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), but local GAAP deviates. Think about US specifics for a moment – 1099 or W2 forms are unique for United States and they are not the same in Canada. If you are expanding to Brazil, you may find out that local legislation is pretty unique and you need to make your Brazilian ERP to be compliant. First thing we recommend you to check with your consulting firm if your Corporate ERP software is localized for the country of expansion. If it is localized – you may go ahead and schedule implementation, otherwise you may do further investigations. Let’s take a look at possible options and review SAP B1 availability and possible advantages:

1. Accounting application scale. If you deploy something like Oracle EBusiness Suite or Microsoft Dynamics AX – you may decide these systems are too heavy lifting for your reasonably small facility in China, Brazil or Russia. Even if these applications are localized in the mentioned countries and regions, it might be too expensive to deploy localization add-ons. At the same time, if you are large company in US, SAP Business One might be too small to be considered for the whole group of facilities, so in this situation you may consider hub-spoke approach, where corporate ERP is on AX and foreign subsidiaries are on SB1

2. Dynamics GP as case study. This system is popular in English speaking countries, and Spanish speaking Latin America. However it is reasonably difficult to have it translated with accepting editable field to the language, where Unicode characters are required. These languages usually are based on hieroglyphs: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. There is utility NJStar, which allows you to enter Chinese characters, however the cost of knowledge curve might be high. This is why we do recommend you to consider for smaller subsidiaries something that is targeted to smaller businesses with very flexible data export options

3. SAP BO as an option for smaller international branches. This small business Corporate ERP application is localized and certified by SAP in many countries, including China, Japan, Russian Federation, Brazil (it is not available in Arabic edition, however). We saw one of the example, when mid-market multinational corporation with the headquarters in Chicago and extensive operations in South America after its Brazilian facility implemented SB1 – the whole group decided to walk away from Great Plains Dynamics and switch over to Business One. As general observation, you can still expect some cost of localization software license and its implementation, but the cost is proportional to SAP B1 price level

4. Consolidated Financial Reporting. There are two approaches to the consolidation. First one is exporting all your General Ledger entries from overseas subsidiaries and importing them into your ERP in the Headquarters, where you have company databases for each subsidiary (for GL transactions only). Then your corporate office based GL is ready for reporting. Second approach is consolidation on the level of exported Excel worksheets (GL Trial Balance). In this case, you do not see all the GL transactions, but use such tools as FRx or Microsoft Management Reporter to consolidate your branches in the Reporting Tree

5. Where SAP BO server side application should be hosted. With the introduction of version 8.8 and recently 8.81 two formerly popular flavors (2005A/B and 2007A/B) were merged and you can host all the companies with all the languages supported on one Microsoft SQL Server (2008, as we are writing these lines in May 2011). All you need to do is provide decent internet connection from your foreign offices and probably Citrix server for user interface (VPN should also work). If you host all the companies in your Headquarter, you management has the advantage to look at all the transactions. As you may know – SAP B1 allows you to switch languages directly in the user interface

6. Openness to Customization and Interface modification. First of all, customization could be done in Business One without even programming and writing a line of code and newly created custom fields (user defined) and tables will be available in existing objects and documents. These new fields are available via user interface upon the creation. Having said this news, we should let you know, that you may enjoy entering data into the user defined fields, however it might be useful in reporting only. Until you animate these tables and fields via SDK programming or external object (DLL, applications, which are programmed in something else). If your plan to create new fields for reporting purposes, then you are done and such tools as Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) should do the job (one of the most popular reports is Sales Commission)

7. Converting data from your legacy accounting to SAP Business One. The recommended tool is Data Transfer Workbench, where CSV file templates are provided. In complex scenarios we can help you in connecting Work Bench via ODBC driver to your legacy data. One of the customers was looking for franchisor catalog update (with new items and substitutes). Work Bench did wonderful job via Advanced ODBC query to MS SQL Server DB, where Catalog was loaded

8. Special considerations to Russian customers. Well, first of all the author is native Russian speaker and was born in Moscow suburbs. Here you may consider also locally coded ERP applications, such as 1S Bukhgalteria (1C Accounting in translation from Russian). In RF you have to deal with government approved standard Chart of Accounts (Account number 20 Manufacturing is well known). Russia is in some way copying French model, where they also have numbered account standards

9. Special Consideration to Brazil. Our company was one of the pioneers in implementing this application. Prior to that we also were approached by Microsoft Business Solutions in Sao Paulo to localize Dynamics GP 7.5. Localization project was later on cancelled, as Microsoft was in decision making mode to switch to Navision and later on Axapta (Dynamics AX). Currently we were told that there are around 40 thousand personal user licenses (SB1 uses all-in-one licensing model)

10. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904. help@efaru.com We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese

Andrew Karasev is Great Plains Certified Master, MVP, help@efaru.com 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904. He is also the initiator of eFaru project http://www.efaru.com and founder of Alba Spectrum information space