SAP Business One in Brazil and South America: Localization, Implementation - overview
 by: Andrew Karasev

SAP Business One has up to 10 thousand installations worldwide and in the perspectives of Latin/South America we are talking about multiple countries, such as Chili, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, etc. Brazil however has some implementation, localization and customization challenges. Being purchased from original vendor in Israel, SAP Business One has such nice features as Multilanguage in one database/company, multicurrency, MRP/Production/Manufacturing, Service Management, CRM (with graphical interactive sales funnel), integration with MS Office on COM level, Drag and Relate, from technical side – Microsoft SQL Server database platform, etc. We’ll describe Brazilian market challenges in the small article format:

• Tax Engine. Who is familiar with the subject understand the importance of Brazilian, Indian, Russian, French tax engine localization. Being very efficiently designed, SAP Business One object model structure still required a lot of development efforts to localize SAP Business One tax engine to Brazilian tax code. SAP seems to have global strategy, while developing Brazilian tax engine. It plans to use the same flexible construction to adopt/localize SAP BO to Indian market, where we have similar issues (uniqueness of the tax code)

• Potruguese/Braziliero translation. This is where SAP BO is really strong – you can switch American English to Portuguese by clicking CNTRL-XXX combination (you will have to close all the SAP BO windows, but hey – this is not a big deal comparing to the amusement to have Multilanguage feature in the same company). Plus you can have user profile to define the language for the named user (SAP Business One has named user flat licensing fee)

• Integration to SAP. SAP Business One has integration gateway to SAP, which makes this product attractive for franchise network, where you consolidate franchisees into central ERP.

• Competitors. You should expect that SAP will try to get market share from such local ERP solutions for midsize (and even large) companies as Microsiga and RM, Microsiga is probably the focus. SAP Business One plans to come up with price strategy, which will make this brand name product licensing price slightly below Microsiga

• Lockbox Processing. Current Localization will allow you to work with several central banks, such as Banco do Brasil.

• Some Drawbacks. No Payroll, just HR, No Project Accounting (however you can emulate project allocation for inventory items through user defined fields, etc.), no Retail Management solution (for Brazil, however 3rd parties exists in Venezuela for Auto Dealership and in Argentina - RMS)

• Licensing. You can start with just one license. In the case if your business has large sales department you can purchase CRM users only licenses and half of the price (you will have access to CRM module with ability to create the quote, order and invoice, plus see the interactions and reporting for these)

• CRM. You can have workflow (compare to Microsoft Sharepoint) with approval cycles, CRM uses messaging through Microsoft Outlook client

Good luck with implementation, customization and integration and if you have issues or concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call São Paulo 55-11-3826-3449, USA: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918! [email protected]

About The Author

Andrew Karasev is Great Plains specialist in Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – SAP, Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Microsoft CRM Partner, serving clients in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Manaus, Lisboa, Coimbra, Porto, Cascais and having locations in multiple states and internationally.