SAP Business One as ERP for Small Company with International Business Ambitions

Here you are opening new firm and decide to produce your product in China with the intention to keep business secrets.  In order to achieve this patent protection goal you are opening small assembling facility in China and invite your college friend who is native Chinese guy to oversee the managerial routine.  In order to sell and support the product in such lucrative international areas as Brazil, Western Europe and Russia you have to open tiny offices in these countries.  At this point your product is successfully marching across the globe and the nature of your operations could be still categorized as small business.  You are successful entrepreneur but how about Small Business ERP and accounting application?  Let’s take a look at the international ERP system requirements:

1. In foreign country local people typically speak their own language.  This is not the discovery of the wheel however there are nuances in the history of computer history in enabling international languages one by one.  ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange was introduced by American National Standard Institute based on the two registers (lower and upper) of the byte (eight bits).  Latin alphabet could be coded in lower register including all the punctuation characters and for the foreign language support there was the upper register.  However if you would like to count unique characters in such alphabets as Chinese you would probably come to the conclusion that there are more hieroglyphs than eight bits could of represent.  Subsequent evolution ended up with such concept as Unicode where all the World languages characters are represented in two bytes.  The problem in ERP system selection lays in the fact that applications architected in late 1880th and earlier 1990th were mostly based on initial ASCII table and they have no or very limited support for Unicode

2. Sovereign country has the rights to impose its own and often unique business regulation in such areas as taxation, monetary policy and international funds transfer, federal tax filing and industry requirements to name a few.  There is the tendency here that smaller countries are trying to open their markets by sticking to ‘International GAAP standards’ while regional powers such as India, Brazil, China or Russian Federations are formally respecting GAAP however they are enjoying more freedom in issuing business related instructions often lead by the intention to facilitate local industries prosperity.  Corporate ERP application has to be in compliance to these rules if it is officially marketed and supported in the foreign country

3. Where is SAP Business One regarding ERP localization?  It does support Unicode and is localized in the majority of world regions including Brazil, China, Western Europe and Russia

4. SAP Business One deployment in international environment.  We recommend you to install the system on the SQL server in the United States and expose it via Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Server to international offices for data entry.  This method should allow you easy access to documents entered in the international office by switching user interface language directly in user menu

5. Centralized IT control and accounting system selection.  We’ve seen it numerous times when IT managers suggest foreign subsidiary to pick its own accounting system with their own respected criteria.  There result might be predicted – foreign colleagues select something that is unique for their country, requires local server and is not compatible with your ERP application in the USA headquarters.  Centrally picked Corporate ERP brand is more geared to secure centralized control in internal audit and managerial reporting

6. Looking toward the future.  Important consideration is where we might expect ourselves in ten or twenty years from now.  Generic accounting system is subject to version upgrades where new version is released every few years in general.  And in the three or so time span while the current version is out there it is normal to expect service pack (or patches in SAP terminology) to be released and recommended to be applied.  However if you are in ERP consulting for a while you should remember such stories as product line abandonment and recommendation to migrate to something else.  Examples are Great Plains Accounting for DOS or Microsoft Small Business Financials.  There are no guidelines to manage accounting application obsolescence but we would recommend the criteria on being relatively young and at the same time winning sizable market share with high rate of implementation success

7. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representatives pick up the phone in Naperville and St. Joseph, MI call centers).  help@efaru.com.  We have local presence in Atlanta, Chicago, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico and Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese.  One of our experiences is international Corporate ERP and Consolidated Financial reporting