The Company- Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical multi-national
The Problem- this Pharmaceutical manufacturer, much like most large multi-nationals, was managing their global operations, including Brazil, from a SAP Center of Excellence. Because outbound Nota Fiscal processes in Brazil are required to be real-time or the truck is not allowed to leave the loading dock, IT was always on call for day to day production support issues. The in-house Nota Fiscal solution which they acquired had multiple components including: SAP configuration, a print procedure, a middleware component, and a specific software for Nota Fiscal compliance. This complexity caused day to day production support issues and outages.
So when the inhouse solution was threatening the financial team with non-compliance and the logistics teams with an inability to ship, the leadership started looking for an alternative that:
- eliminated the SAP production support and configuration issues now and in the future
- lowered the ongoing costs to support
- provided enterprise support where they could pick up the phone in Portuguese and English, so both their local staff and corporate SAP staff could solve their issues
- guaranteed compliance with any future changes
- eliminated duplicate hardware and multiple systems
The Solution– By utilizing Invoiceware’s Latin American Compliance Network with SAP ERP templates, this global pharmaceutical manufacturer was able to eliminate the production support issues today while protecting their SAP system from future issues. Changes to the local requirements are managed within the ERP templates which removes the burden of constantly updating your SAP every time the local regulation changes and the Latin America Compliance Network maintains the connectivity for Brazil Nota Fiscal for Goods, NF for Services, CTe for Transportation Invoices, Mexico eFactura (CFD and CFDI), Argentina AFIP, et al….
The Lesson- If you are having production support problems today with your in-house solutions, don’t wait to find a better alternative. Managing an in-house software solution for SAP Brazil Nota Fiscal can be complex and has many costs including: multiple software solutions, multiple maintenance fees, multiple hardware maintenance fees, day to day production support, ongoing change management and upgrade support. For organizations that are running Shared Business Services and/or single instances of SAP – a managed service provider with specific focus on SAP may make more sense to alleviate the constant headache both day to day and over the long term as the legislation changes.
