SAP Business One in Multinational Corporation Expansion Strategy

Dec 9
08:46

2011

Andrew Karasev

Andrew Karasev

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When you are expanding internationally and crossing the borders of the United States important question is about your oversea subsidiary accounting system. Two criteria might be a bit conflicting where the first one is financial and operational control and the second one is compliance to foreign country tax code.

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And here second criterion might be crucial to be met as compliance in such regional powers as Brazil,SAP Business One in Multinational Corporation Expansion Strategy Articles China or Russia is critical.  Let’s review how Business One fits here and how it could be deployed internationally in hub-and-spokes ERP model:

1. SAP B1 is localized in the majority of world regions and it supports Unicode meaning that it is friendly to languages based on hieroglyphs such as Japanese, Korean and Chinese.  Localization is coming directly from SAP in its required features.  There might be optional requirements where you may expect one of the regional ISV to cover them

2. What are deployment recommendations?  In order to retain reasonable control we recommend you to deploy all your international branches on single Microsoft SQL Server hosted in your headquarters in the USA.  You can open the system to international users via Citrix or Terminal Server.  Beginning with version 8.8 SAP B1 has all languages supported on the same instance of the SQL Server and A and B hives do not exist anymore comparing to the situation with 2007A/B and 2005A/B.  Central location facilitates internal audit as well as reduces IT support cost and enables consolidated financial and managerial reporting

3. Licenses Acquisition or where should we purchase software licenses?  Consider purchasing licenses in the United States where your headquarters is located.  If you purchase licenses in each country separate your central installation might be not possible.  Plus there might be complication as foreign consulting firm might be not authorized to sell licenses Worldwide and this is why they might be agitating you to install software on the server located in their country

4. Who will be doing the implementation job or how to select consulting firm?  Good strategy is picking central partner here in the United States who will be coordinating international implementations.  If you VAR has offices or affiliated consulting organizations in critical locations likely China, Russia and Brazil then you are in good hands

5. Do we have to expect all the implementation and support work to be done onsite with high travel cost?  It might be good idea to pay travel expenses first time when your consulting team is forming relations via shaking hands and picnics.  In the future however the work could be done via web sessions and phone/Skype conferences

6. How about the fact that we have non SAP ERP solutions in the headquarters?  Well SB1 exports pretty much everything to Excel or you can do custom queries to export something that is not available via standard preset reports.  General Ledger trial balance export in Excel could be attached in consolidated Balance Sheet or P&L in FRx or Microsoft Management Reporter

7. 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 and Chinese