With globalization progress even midsize firm might become acting as multinational company with such attributes as subsidiary overseas in Asia or Europe or in South America.
Typical situation in the foreign country is when local legislation doesn’t allow you to open branch and just sell through it. Instead it is common to open local company with full or major ownership by your parent company here in the United States or Canada or wherever it is registered. With complex legal structure such requirements as consolidated financial reporting, international company GL template including Chart of Accounts and system transparency to internal audit might be associated. Before rushing into hiring consulting firm to implement the pieces of your ERP infrastructure we would like to give you several advises from our own international accounting consulting practice. This publication is not technical it is rather for management team to initiate their homework:
1. Is it OK to have several ERP applications integrated or controlled via consolidated P&L and Balance Sheet? Well first of all you should review your legacy accounting application which is in production in your headquarters. If you think that it fits your business processes and in synch with your future plans then the second question is where it is localized on the foreign ERP software markets in the countries where you are opening subsidiaries or not. Here in the United States and Canada there are numerous midmarket accounting platforms and we would like to name Microsoft Dynamics GP, Sage MAS, Peach Tree Enterprise and SAP B1. One of the leaders in the number of installations is Dynamics GP. This application is so flexible with hundreds of add-ons that it fits to most of the industries. However it is not available worldwide but only in English and Arabic speaking countries as well as in Spanish speaking Americas. If your target is China, Brazil or Russia then GP is not an ideal solution for the subsidiary there. Keep reading we will come through examples where GP and SAP BO tandem is an option
2. Implementation and license acquisition strategies. Here you should think about control from your headquarters. In order to retain such a control consider hosting databases on the server in the US and opening them to foreign users via Terminal Server or Citrix technologies. Second good advice is to design templates for all your companies which should facilitate future implementations for your facilities overseas as well as help you build consolidated financial reporting. Best results could be achieved if you are acquiring licenses here in the United States and choose strategic consulting company which will subcontract foreign country specific compliance requirements implementation to local firm which is not a big deal for them to locate
3. Who will go onsite to our overseas facility? Going onsite is really something that might be considered as optional. It is good idea to have face to face meetings in the foreign country to form and cement relations, but assuming that you are hosting your server in the headquarters then user training and data conversion could be done here or even through web session or VOIP conference. We have seen numerous cases where foreign accounting personnel had the tendency to mystify the complexity of their country tax code and request local licenses acquisition and server location while in the headquarters IT people and controller were trying to exercise control
4. Now let’s take a look at Business One on the international scenes. It is supported internationally and localized directly by SAP in most of the world regions including Brazil, China, Russian Federation and Latin America. If you are midmarket company and you do not expect the number of named users to be higher than one hundred and your legacy ERP should be replaced by something else then we do recommend you to make research about SAP B1. If you are deploying Dynamics GP in the USA then we would like to share with you the case study where SAP B1 was implemented for Brazilian production facility with weekly GL entries export from SQL Server database of B1 and importing them into the shadow company in GP via Integration Manager. This solution was sort of luxury as it allows you to see GL details. But it is possible to export GL trial balance from Business One and use it as foreign subsidiary data in consolidated Profit and Loss or Balance Sheet in Microsoft Management Reporter or old-good-days FRx
5. Does it support Unicode? This is very good question as our Latin, Cyrillic or Arabic based alphabets are based on limited number of characters and it is possible to encode these symbols in just one hundred and twenty seven bits or half of one byte. These languages were standardized by ASCII for computing purposes. However with the rising of China as world production factory the need in new standards to encode hieroglyphs should be created where one byte is not enough. The good news is that SAP Business One supports Unicode. Just to give you comparison with Dynamics GP where Dexterity code doesn’t support Unicode and with the help of such add-ons as NJStar you can get limited Chinese languages support but we do not recommend you to take this direction if you are opening subsidiary in China
6. Internal Audit. Apparently your auditors located in the USA might be not familiar with Chinese, Russian, Spanish or Portuguese user interface and audit on the level of pulling and reviewing Invoices, Purchase Orders or GL transactions would be complex. However in B1 you can switch user interface from one language to another directly via short keys or associate default language with named user. If your chart of accounts is standardized then you as internal auditor have the tool to do the job
7. Business One versus Dynamics AX. It seems like both SAP and Microsoft Business Solutions are staking on these ERP solutions in the United States and internationally and former Axapta also supports Unicode and is available in Russia, Brazil or China. AX however is more geared toward large enterprise and such functionality as Process and Discrete Manufacturing and its implementation requires higher consulting budget. There are opinions that Axapta implementation is often associated with customization and Business One is good to be implemented ‘out-of-the-box.’ If you are large multinational corporation where the number of users crosses one hundred then AX is probably the one to review. The competition to Axapta is in the forms of SAP high end and Oracle Ebusiness Suite and the topic is outside of the scope
8. Competition from locally programmed software. Having consulting practices in Brazil and Russian federation we would like to share with you the news on what is going on out there. In Brazil local offer seems to be dominating from local ERP product Microsiga which fits perfectly to Brazilian legislation and local consulting is easy to find. In Russian Federation local competition is lead by 1S Accounting
9. Providing Second Opinion. There might be global ERP implementation issues, failures or kind of limbo situations. If this is your case the news is that you are probably not the first and not the last one. Ask for second opinion by finding candidate via Google or Yahoo search
10. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan and 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. We feature our expertise is in International Business. We provide second opinion in SB1 data migration, customization and reporting
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