Case Study
Sun Chemical
Sovos made multinational reporting simple for Sun Chemical, allowing it to consolidate its compliance efforts.
Sun Chemical consolidates its global tax obligation with Sovos
Summary
Business Challenges
-
Sun Chemical sought to find the right solution to minimize the impact of changing mandates on 24/7 business operations.
-
The company needed to address language barrier among local and technical teams.
Solution
-
Sun Chemical needed a platform that could consolidate its compliance efforts across all its Latin American markets.
Benefits
-
The Sovos Business to Government regional solution minimizes business delays and disruptions for 24/7 operations.
-
It offers local support in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, eliminating the language barrier issue.
-
Without the constant need for legislative monitoring, the Sun Chemical team can focus on innovation.
The Company
Sun Chemical is the world’s largest producer of printing inks and pigments. With more than $3.5 billion in annual sales, the company is a leading provider of materials to packaging, publication, coatings, plastics, cosmetics and other industrial markets in 56 countries. Sun Chemical operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has hundreds of multinational suppliers and partners from around the world.
The Challenge
Sun Chemical cannot afford business disruptions or shipping issues due to its operating schedule. Its e-invoicing process must be seamless across throughout the process, including SAP configuration, middleware performance, connections to the local authority’s compliance server, and printing.
Because of e-invoicing mandates in Latin America, Sun Chemical faced the challenge of conducting constant legislation reviews to determine new requirements that needed to be converted into the system. The language barrier also posed a challenge. With technical requirements being communicated in local languages, fluency to understand the mandates and to convert changes into the system was required. For parties without a high level of technical proficiency in the local language, this caused lag time and confusion, contributing to reduced efficiencies.
The Solution
Based on individual compliance needs, Sun Chemical initially elected to implement different solutions in each country. In Argentina, it selected the regional Sovos Business to Government Reporting solution to maintain its compliance platform. In Chile and Mexico, it selected two separate local providers with two different models, and in Mexico, it implemented an internal solution.
“Change is happening, but we’ll automatically solve it with the [Sovos] solution. Converting a legal requirement in a local language into a configuration plan is very complex, so the service of automatic updates to the new legislation was a clear key point of help for us.”
Aldo Magenes
SAPAnalyst, Sun Chemical
The Benefits
The metrics showed a large production support advantage in Argentina, where Sun Chemical had implemented the Sovos Business to Government Reporting regional platform. The company elected to expand its partnership with Sovos to cover its operations in Chile, Mexico and Brazil as well.
The Results
With local support in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the Sovos Business to Government Reporting regional platform helped Sun Chemical isolate its compliance problems and focus on driving business results. The Sovos solution alleviated the need to monitor every single change and translate each of those changes into system configuration plans, saving the team valuable time and reducing the risk of penalties.
Why Sovos?
Sun Chemical evaluated each of its four Latin American e-invoicing compliance solutions with a series of analytics measuring cost and benefits. Company leaders knew the internal team’s time was best spent on innovation and improving business and customer relationships, so they were looking for the solution that would minimize delays and disruptions and keep the team focused where it mattered most.