The Company – Fortune 500 – Chemicals – Fragrances & Food Additives
The Problem – The global Chemical company, which specializes in additives that enhance products we all use every day from the grocery story, was dealing with upcoming government compliance in Latin America. Like many large multi-nationals, they operated a consolidated SAP environment. The issue for this company was how to tackle electronic invoicing legislation in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. In the evaluation, executives wanted to find a solution that worked natively with SAP, covered multiple countries, and protected their investment from the ongoing changes that occur all the time in Latin America. They did not want to have constantly changing international legislation affecting their plans and rollout objectives with their centralized SAP system. Multiple options were ultimately evaluated: On Premise Software, Local Vendors in each country (both On Premise and On Demand), and a Latin America e-Invoicing Managed Service.
The Solution – On Premise software posed a number of issues including: heavy reliance on internal SAP and IT resources that were already fully utilized, and the On Premise solutions only partially covered the requirement (i.e. some only supported one country such as Brazil forcing the need for multiple solutions, also all requirements (Nota Fiscal for Services NF-s) were not covered by the On Premise solutions ). In the final decision, the Chemical company selected an On Demand Latin America Managed Service because: they could simplify the implementation by gaining economies of scale with a common platform, they could gain access to multiple countries with one interface and one contract, and more importantly any changes in the future would be included in the ongoing service. The e-Invoicing Managed Service selected also provided native integration into SAP so that there would be little drain on internal resources. And, all country upgrades were included in the managed service contract, including the changes to the SAP templates and dashboards.
The Lesson – Global organizations have alternative solutions in the marketplace that can simplify their IT infrastructure, simplify the support process, and simplify their ability to handle the ongoing changes that occur monthly and annually with Brazil Nota Fiscal, Mexico CFDI and Argentina AFIP. As your organization looks to deal with the 2012 changes in Brazil and Mexico, you should use the new licensing and project requirements to re-evaluate your Latin America e-Invoicing strategy.
