Important factors here are languages support in all the countries where you have your subsidiaries as well as compliance to taxation and regulation. Natural idea is to suggest simply deploy the same ERP system which is used in the headquarters.
But chances are high that it doesn’t qualify. Of course SAP B1 is also not available in all world regions and it is not translated at this time into Arabic. But it was designed initially to become international accounting package and it is translated into such popular languages as English, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian just to open the list. This publication doesn’t pretend to be technical and it might be not ideal for programmers. If you are IT department decision maker in multinational firm – feel free to read the details and let us know if you have questions or suggestions:
1. ERP localization concept. As we already mentioned above it has two aspects. First one is supporting country language in user interface and reporting. And the second one is compliance to tax code and business regulation. Multinationals tend to have subsidiaries in the form of local corporations in all hosting countries. So your ideal accounting software should be localized in all targeted countries
2. Before we continue lets answer popular questions. ‘Why don’t we just switch to high-end application such as SAP, Oracle Financials or Microsoft Dynamics AX’. The answer is likely simple as these applications have rich functionality and high license price. Foreign facilities are typically mid-size and even small and it might be not feasible to implement those systems there
3. Second popular question. ‘We have Microsoft Dynamics GP and we are expanding to Brazil and China. Is it localized there and could we deploy it for our subsidiaries in Sao Paulo and Beijing?’ Well regarding Brazil this was a long story as our company was contracted by Microsoft to localized former Great Plains version 7.5. This was back in 2004. Later on Microsoft changed its mind in favor of Navision Dynamics NAV and then around 2006 in favor of Dynamics AX (formerly known as Axapta). Regarding China Great Plains Dexterity (the shell platform) doesn’t support Unicode and Chinese hieroglyphs. In both Brazil and China taxes and regulations are pretty complex and we do not recommend doing localization in-house
4. Let’s now assume that you are planning to open office in Campinas Sao Paulo region. What should you expect? First of all this is Public Digital Bookkeeping (SPED) requirements as well as tax formulas to be really complicated comparing to what we have here in the United States or Canada. Is SPED automated in Business One? Yes it is via third party add-on. Plus taxation could be setup directly in core Brazilian localization. SPED is not cheap and you should expect it to be comparable by cost to couple of professional user licenses
Let’s try to switch to FAQ style where questions and answers are short:
Q. What should we expect moving to China?A. Application supports simplified and traditional Chinese. There might be provincial taxation complications. But in general this software is getting its foots to Chinese soil
Q. In Russia as we understand that everything regarding regulation is decided in Moscow. We are acquiring mining facility in Siberia. Is B1 a good fit for us?A. User interface is available in Russian and we recommend this system as ERP application. However annual and quarterly reporting requires printing very specific forms to be filed with tax agency. You may expect additional work (translating GL to 1C Accounting or doing the job directly in Excel)
Q. Does it support manufacturing accounting?A. Yes in its simple discrete production aspect and it has simple MRP (inventory items and parts restocking) functionality
Q. We plan to switch over from local accounting packages in several countries to B1. We think that reasonable data conversion is required. How this work could be done?A. Review Data Transfer Workbench first and think about if your data could be exported, cleansed and saved in DTW CSV files format. If this is doable then you are on the right track
Q. Should we deploy local server in each country?A. We would rather recommend deployment of the single server (Windows and SQL - here consider SQL cluster if reliability is the concern) in the headquarters and opening user interface via Citrix. There might be several Citrix application servers in the headquarters each supporting unique foreign language
Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, Atlanta Georgia, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA and Canada nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). We are working on Brazilian ERP consulting market in Sao Paulo since 2004
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