W.R. Grace eliminates the burden of ERP maintenance with Sovos

case study

W.R. Grace & Co.

Sovos relieved the burden of managing SAP modifications and maintenance internally for W.R. Grace & Co., allowing the company to focus on its global expansion initiatives.

Summary

Business Challenges

  • Multiple on-premise solutions

  • Difficult to support due to lack of subject matter expertise

  • Unbudgeted updates to SAP as a result of changing country requirements

Solution

W.R. Grace selected the Sovos Business to Government Reporting regional platform to manage compliance for:

  • Brazil’s Nota Fiscal
  • Mexico’s eContabilidad

Benefits

  • Regional platform works seamless with SAP

  • Changing regulations can be implemented with no business disruption

  • One system of record means no inconsistencies in government reporting

The Company

W.R. Grace & Co is a global leader in chemicals and materials, offering innovative products, technologies and services that improve their customer partners’ products and processes in over 150 countries around the world. Grace employs approximately 6,500 people in more than 40 countries.

The Challenge

W.R. Grace had to take a hard look at how it was managing the complex and demanding compliance landscape in Latin America. Each Latin American country in which Grace was doing business had previously implemented a different on-premise e-invoicing mandate. These various requirements and the frequent changes in the compliance landscape were causing multiple business issues across the organisation, including:

  • A need to patch each solution per constant changes in business-to-government regulations
  • Lack of local process and individual e-invoicing solution knowledge
  • Unbudgeted and unplanned efforts to update SAP with every country change

The Solution

Ultimately, the impact of this complex technology infrastructure was resulting in higher maintenance costs and increased exposure to business shutdowns should any of their e-invoicing solutions go down, prompting the company to seek a regional solution across Latin America. One of Grace’s top requirements was a regional platform that would work seamlessly with SAP ERP.

“We selected [Sovos] because they provide a single platform to handle our regional requirements including Brazil Nota Fiscal and Mexico CFDI. Their solutions are specifically tailored to multinationals managing a global SAP ERP landscape.”

Srini Vanga

Director of Enterprise Applications, W.R. Grace & Co.

The Results

The power of on-premise integration with the cloud eliminates the burden of managing SAP modifications and maintenance internally. The added benefit of SAP now being the system of record for reporting back to government dramatically reduces the risks and costs of compliance with local regulations throughout Latin America.

With the everyday burden of complying across Latin America resolved, Grace can now focus their internal resources on global innovation instead of constant regional changes to SAP.

Why Sovos?

W.R. Grace evaluated its options and eventually selected the Sovos Business to Government Reporting regional platform to help with e-invoicing regulations, starting with Mexico and Brazil.

The Sovos cloud platform offers a simplified compliance landscape for Grace, allowing changes in regulations to be implemented faster, with minimum business disruption. Daily process support and government integration within SAP eliminates the need to allocate resources to proactively monitor and respond to each country’s regulatory changes.