SAP B1 has over 200 installations in Brazil at this time and the number of new customers is growing. In this article we would like to recommend SAP BO as ERP system for multinational corporation with subsidiary in Brazil. There are certain strong points about SAP B1 and certain areas for future improvement, but you as a manager should understand these pluses and minuses to make a selection decision
Pluses:
o Internationalization. It includes multicurrency, multiple languages support, availability across Latin America, in USA, Europe, Asia, etc. If your company is present on all or the majority of these markets, you can consider spoke (SAP BO in local country) – and – Hub (MySAP in Headquarters) model, which is reasonably easy controllable from your Headquarters, plus it avoids one-vendor-dependency syndrome in overseas location
o Localization. In large countries, such as Brazil federal, state and municipal regulation typically differs from American, European standards and needs to be specially addressed – this added functionality is typically referred as localization. SAP B1 is officially “localized” for Brazil
o SAP Brand. Again – this is when you prefer to stick to brand name MRP provider, and it should be respected. At the same time, when you stick to such provider as SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics – you probably expect better quality, support and longevity for your ERP
Area for future improvement:
o Localization. If you think about ERP history in Brazil – you should probably accept the fact, that if such locally designed ERP as Microsiga begun to address Brazilian requirements from the first day of going to the MRP market, then “localization” from Microsiga is a bit more advanced, it is addressing Brazilian Payroll, for example, and other features
o State and Municipal legislation. To implement all these taxation, reporting functionality is a matter of time, so you should be patient and respect SAP efforts to localize these requirements one-by-one as time permits. Meanwhile you should prepare required filing documents in Excel, based on SAP B1 reporting which is the base for your analysis and calculations
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