Dynamics Gp Implementation For Global Enterprise

Dynamics Gp Implementation For Global Enterprise

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If you are working in IT department of the multinational corporation or your company is planning to expand internationally, we have some notes for you. This paper is about Microsoft Dynamics GP, but first part of it is relevant to most of the Corporate ERP applications. When you are operating within US borders everything related to your accounting application might seem as simple enough: 1099 forms filing, W2 and then just compiling P&L and prepare corporate tax filing report. Sometimes you probably face State sales tax audit, sometimes federal one This is probably it, isnt it? Now, lets speculate about the best way to cross US borders, we already own ERP licenses, we can create as many companies, as we expect to have foreign subsidiaries why dont we do it in Great Plains directly and expose our SQL Server via Citrix to all our regional offices overseas? This idea deserves the right to be considered seriously on the first step. Lets take a look at some international business accounting challenges:

1.ERP localization for specific country. First of all in the foreign country you may have a need for your Corporate ERP interface to be available on the local language. You are lucky if you are expanding to another English speaking country, such as UK, Canada, Australia. But if you are expanding internationally usually you are trying to get advantage of foreign country labor cost and your foreign subsidiary is likely to be involved into heavy manufacturing, supply chain management, logistics, distribution, product technical support, etc. Likely that you are looking at South America, Mexico, South East Asia: China, Philippines, India, Indonesia that sort of countries and regions. Language is probably not a big challenge to enable, but how about the second component compliance to local business regulation? In the United States we are lucky, as there are few generic regulations, such as the need to print and file 1099 form (so IRS has the tool to get approximate calculation of your supplier revenue level). In foreign country the regulation might be tighter, for example in Brazil you could expect invoice number register, where you cannot skip numbering at your will. As general observation when you are expanding into the country, which is regional dominant power, such as China, Russia, Brazil, India you should expect higher level of local compliance requirements

2.Where GP is currently localized? Probably previous paragraph was a tough one to read and think about, we tried to give you some doze of the pessimism, and this is the reality of the international business practice. Now the good news it is localized in most of the English speaking countries, including South East Asia and Oceania where English is in use as the language of business. It is also available in most of the Spanish speaking Central and South America, Caribbean, except Brazil, where the language is Brazilian Portuguese. Lets now move to Arabian peninsula and Africa. Great Plans is traditionally available in Arabic countries with multiple localization brands. In Africa it is available in Arabic or English flavor

3.Chinese Hieroglyphs. Well, Dexterity, the architecture of this ERP application doesnt support Unicode or UTF8 characters, it supports only ASCII compliant alphabets. I personally posed this question about Unicode support in the future versions of Dexterity to David Musgrave on Convergence 2010 in Atlanta. As you may know David is Dexterity technology evangelist working for Microsoft Business Solutions in Australia. His answer was No with some remarks meaning that there are some works around the problem. We have several customers in the USA, where they are serving to Chinese American community and deploy GP as accounting application. We found that one of the tools to deploy is NJ Star, plus you can print Crystal Reports, combining data from Great Plains SQL company database and Chinese characters captured and saved by NJ Star into customer tables (the most popular was SOP Blank Invoice Form replacement in Crystal)

4.Russian fields of snow. In Russian Federation we see good signs of European and American investments, especially in such industries as Oil and Gas (Power), Mining (Coal, Gold and other Precious metals, Copper, in Siberia or Karelia), plus general merchandise suppliers from the West (typically Warehouse Management operations along Smolensk and Riga highways). We do not recommend GP for your Moscow or Russian subsidiary. If you have to stick to MBS, consider Dynamics AX formerly known as Axapta. Another brand name is SAP Business One. If you would like to try local ERP platform, consider 1S Bukhgalteria (in our opinion local alternative to AX or SB1 in Brazil is Microsiga)

5.Multiple accounting platforms for Global Enterprise. There are two methods to deal with multiple Corporate ERP platforms: GL level transactions integration and Consolidated Financial and possibly Managerial Reporting. Lets consider the first option. Lets say, you are deploying SAP Business One in Brazilian production facility. Create GL only shadow company in Great Plains, export transactions from B1 regularly into Excel or text file and import them into GP via Integration Manager as GL transactions simple enough. The second approach works like this you are running SAP Business One in Brazil and export its Balance Sheet or Profit and Loss statement into Excel. Then you are consolidating it in FRx Financial Reporting

6.Dynamics AX rising star. At this point we believe that you understand the challenges of the international Corporate ERP selection and implementation. This application is coming from Microsoft Business Solutions, it is localized in 38 countries (as the fact of the summer of 2009, more countries are coming as time going). It is available and localized in such challenging regions as China People Republic, Russian Federation, Mexico, Brazil, Scandinavia (in fact it was initiated in Denmark), Germany, Hungary and other countries. Axapta is extremely good in such industries as process manufacturing, supply chain management

7.SAP Business One. This ERP was branded as small business platform in the USA, but internationally, in Brazil for example, it is considered as id-market MRP and Accounting application. We do recommend this platform to consider, especially where you think that AX is too expensive to implement and you would rather have something smaller

8.Expanding to a smaller country where international GAAP is in place. This might be just our opinion, but we compared multiple countries legislations and we found out, that smaller countries are trying to pursue the strategy to imitate international GAAP compliance literally and do not create additional complications

9.For further information, please call us 1-866-304-3265 or email help@efaru.com

About the Author:
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



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