United States V. Microsoft Corporation
United States V. Microsoft Corporation
Dynamics AX as Corporate ERP for Global Organization
This is probably the only offer from Microsoft Business Solutions, and this offer is really a jewel by its flexibility and power, which is translated to major foreign languages and localized in major countries. Former Axapta was architected in Europe back in 1990th by Daamgard Software with the goal to market it to global upper mid-market companies. Such features as multicurrency, Unicode languages support (was added later), process and discrete manufacturing, CRM as well as customizability via MorphX X++ make AX good choice for being implemented as Corporate ERP and MRP in Global Enterprise. Let's review Dynamics AX technology, internationalization and technical support options. This small publication is not intended for programmers who are looking for the opportunity to find technical whitepaper to switch from C# or Java to introduction level X++ programming. It is rather for IT director and company management to help them with next Corporate ERP selection. If you are software developer we recommend you recent books on AX 2009, plus if you are working for one of Microsoft Dynamics resellers, you should be able to get all the way to access to AX technical resources on the Partner Source:
1. AX as localized Corporate ERP on the global software market. Microsoft Business Solutions markets this application virtually worldwide, including United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Latin America, China, Japan, Korea, Arabic World, United Europe, South East Asia, Australia, New Zealand. Localization includes two components: local language support and compliance to tax and government reporting legislation in the specific country or region. There was some historical trend about ERP and Accounting applications developed in United States to concentrate on English and US software market and place international languages support in to low priority basket. Good example is Great Plains Dynamics with its Dexterity architecture, where architects restricted Dexterity to ASCII table support only (one byte long characters). In contrast Axapta was designed as flexible in supporting international alphabets. When we are talking about Unicode support, we mean hieroglyphs based languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai. We should also mention that AX in its current versions 2012 and 2009 is localized in such popular markets as Brazil, Russian Federation (where you see such regions as Siberia with its minerals, diamonds and oil mining)
2. Process Manufacturing Automation as your leverage in Food Processing Industry. AX naturally has business logic required in so-called process manufacturing. Let's take a look at some of its features. If you are meat processing factory, where you have cows, pigs, lambs of chickens as raw materials and then you are producing packaged meet. Each individual animal has its own weight and fat to protein percentage. However you expect some deviation, but average percentage is known and you can predict how many packages you could produce from individual chicken (breasts, tenders, thighs, legs, wings)
3. Process Production in Mining and Oil Drilling. Pretty much similar to previous paragraph – you have some initial predictions, but what is really in your mine – you will see when you begin your extraction and excavation. The same could be mention about other mining activity, such as diamonds, gold, silver, ore, nickel, copper, asbestos (Tuva)
4. Siberian Woods Cutting and Processing. Technically what is going on here might not be classified as perfect timber industry practices. However it works and it is reasonably cheap. Precious types of arbors are cut in upper Tuva, Burjatia or Khakassia, then they are either float on their own or being consolidated into larger plots (typically on the Yenisei River or on Kaa Hem River as it is known on republic of Tuva territory). If you are multinational corporation and you are controlling Siberian timber industry, your office might be located in Novokuznetsk, Abakan or Abaza. Axapta process manufacturing should do the job in timber industry
5. Chinese Manufacturing Mill. Current version 2012 as we are writing this paper in June 2011 is translated to Chinese and localized for this country
6. Centralized Deployment and Opening AX to International Users via Citrix or Remote Desktop Connections. In global organization centralized control is critical. One of the mistakes in our opinion is letting regional offices choose and implement their own "local" Corporate ERP system. ERP platform is your operations control instrument and it should be deployed on the central server in US or where your headquarters is
About the Author
Andrew Karasev is Great Plains Certified Master, MVP, [email protected] 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
United States V. Microsoft Corporation
United States vs Microsoft Trial Day 1 : part 1
SAP Business One as Corporate ERP Extension for Multinational Corporation
If you are expanding internationally it is natural idea to deploy the same Corporate ERP platform for your foreign subsidiary. However there are numerous nuances that you have to consider. First of all foreign country may have its own language and your ERP at the Headquarters might not support this language. This might be minor issue, as your foreign employees are reasonably good in English, or you can even translate the most popular forms and reports. In the foreign countries you may find out that, even business related legislation might be compliant with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), but local GAAP deviates. Think about US specifics for a moment – 1099 or W2 forms are unique for United States and they are not the same in Canada. If you are expanding to Brazil, you may find out that local legislation is pretty unique and you need to make your Brazilian ERP to be compliant. First thing we recommend you to check with your consulting firm if your Corporate ERP software is localized for the country of expansion. If it is localized – you may go ahead and schedule implementation, otherwise you may do further investigations. Let's take a look at possible options and review SAP B1 availability and possible advantages:
1. Accounting application scale. If you deploy something like Oracle EBusiness Suite or Microsoft Dynamics AX – you may decide these systems are too heavy lifting for your reasonably small facility in China, Brazil or Russia. Even if these applications are localized in the mentioned countries and regions, it might be too expensive to deploy localization add-ons. At the same time, if you are large company in US, SAP Business One might be too small to be considered for the whole group of facilities, so in this situation you may consider hub-spoke approach, where corporate ERP is on AX and foreign subsidiaries are on SB1
2. Dynamics GP as case study. This system is popular in English speaking countries, and Spanish speaking Latin America. However it is reasonably difficult to have it translated with accepting editable field to the language, where Unicode characters are required. These languages usually are based on hieroglyphs: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. There is utility NJStar, which allows you to enter Chinese characters, however the cost of knowledge curve might be high. This is why we do recommend you to consider for smaller subsidiaries something that is targeted to smaller businesses with very flexible data export options
3. SAP BO as an option for smaller international branches. This small business Corporate ERP application is localized and certified by SAP in many countries, including China, Japan, Russian Federation, Brazil (it is not available in Arabic edition, however). We saw one of the example, when mid-market multinational corporation with the headquarters in Chicago and extensive operations in South America after its Brazilian facility implemented SB1 – the whole group decided to walk away from Great Plains Dynamics and switch over to Business One. As general observation, you can still expect some cost of localization software license and its implementation, but the cost is proportional to SAP B1 price level
4. Consolidated Financial Reporting. There are two approaches to the consolidation. First one is exporting all your General Ledger entries from overseas subsidiaries and importing them into your ERP in the Headquarters, where you have company databases for each subsidiary (for GL transactions only). Then your corporate office based GL is ready for reporting. Second approach is consolidation on the level of exported Excel worksheets (GL Trial Balance). In this case, you do not see all the GL transactions, but use such tools as FRx or Microsoft Management Reporter to consolidate your branches in the Reporting Tree
5. Where SAP BO server side application should be hosted. With the introduction of version 8.8 and recently 8.81 two formerly popular flavors (2005A/B and 2007A/B) were merged and you can host all the companies with all the languages supported on one Microsoft SQL Server (2008, as we are writing these lines in May 2011). All you need to do is provide decent internet connection from your foreign offices and probably Citrix server for user interface (VPN should also work). If you host all the companies in your Headquarter, you management has the advantage to look at all the transactions. As you may know – SAP B1 allows you to switch languages directly in the user interface
6. Openness to Customization and Interface modification. First of all, customization could be done in Business One without even programming and writing a line of code and newly created custom fields (user defined) and tables will be available in existing objects and documents. These new fields are available via user interface upon the creation. Having said this news, we should let you know, that you may enjoy entering data into the user defined fields, however it might be useful in reporting only. Until you animate these tables and fields via SDK programming or external object (DLL, applications, which are programmed in something else). If your plan to create new fields for reporting purposes, then you are done and such tools as Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) should do the job (one of the most popular reports is Sales Commission)
7. Converting data from your legacy accounting to SAP Business One. The recommended tool is Data Transfer Workbench, where CSV file templates are provided. In complex scenarios we can help you in connecting Work Bench via ODBC driver to your legacy data. One of the customers was looking for franchisor catalog update (with new items and substitutes). Work Bench did wonderful job via Advanced ODBC query to MS SQL Server DB, where Catalog was loaded
8. Special considerations to Russian customers. Well, first of all the author is native Russian speaker and was born in Moscow suburbs. Here you may consider also locally coded ERP applications, such as 1S Bukhgalteria (1C Accounting in translation from Russian). In RF you have to deal with government approved standard Chart of Accounts (Account number 20 Manufacturing is well known). Russia is in some way copying French model, where they also have numbered account standards
9. Special Consideration to Brazil. Our company was one of the pioneers in implementing this application. Prior to that we also were approached by Microsoft Business Solutions in Sao Paulo to localize Dynamics GP 7.5. Localization project was later on cancelled, as Microsoft was in decision making mode to switch to Navision and later on Axapta (Dynamics AX). Currently we were told that there are around 40 thousand personal user licenses (SB1 uses all-in-one licensing model)
About the Author
Andrew Karasev is Great Plains Certified Master, MVP, [email protected] 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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United States V. Microsoft Corporation
