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Dynamics GP Deployment in Multinational Corporation
Andrew Karasev
Multinational companies usually open subsidiaries in foreign countries in the form of corporations. ERP application in order to support such group should have such features as multicurrency, inter-company transactions and consolidated financial reporting. Plus foreign countries often have unique tax rules and compliance legislation and together with foreign language support these compliances are often categorized as ‘ERP localization’. Dynamics GP is localized in such regions as Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and Spanish speaking South, Central and North Americas. Let’s review recommendation for GP deployment in Multinational corporation:
1. Server should be hosted in the headquarters. This recommendation allows you to build ‘template’ company with GL chart of accounts, modules settings and naming conventions. All foreign subsidiaries are hosted together on the same SQL Server (consider SQL cluster is the number of users and transactions is high). Consolidated P&L and Balance Sheets could be easily produced in Microsoft Management Reporter (in older version it was FRx)
2. Application Servers on Citrix or MS Terminal Server technologies. Good idea is to create application server for each language or country. When specific country has unique reporting requirements – it might be realized as Dexterity add-on. If you have subsidiaries in Chile and Argentina then natural choice is to implement Citrix application server with Spanish language support
3. SQL Database Collation. ASCII traditional standard has 256 bits. In addition to standard Latin letters foreign languages might have special characters and accents (as in French and Spanish). The number of accents in all Latin based alphabets on the world is higher than 256. This problem is resolved by introduction of SQL Collation. Let’s assume that you have US based headquarters and two subsidiaries in Quebec, Canada and Mexico. Then in order to enable French and Spanish characters entry and storing in SQL database consider changing default (USA English) collation for the company in Montreal to French and in Mexico to Spanish
4. What is GP is not localized in the country where we plan to open subsidiary? There is no easy answer to this question. Let’s think that you are opening branch in Campinas state of Sao Paulo Brazil. It might be not really difficult to translate several forms to Brazilian Portuguese and we already described the technique via Modifier. However Brazil has pretty complicated regulations in government reporting. There is SPED or Public Digital Bookkeeping System where each corporation has to report its AR and AP invoices as well as GL statements to the server hosted by IRS in XML format. In our opinion it is not practical to code SPED in-house and this is one of the reasons why you should not consider Great Plains deployment in Brazil
5. Multicurrency. It is realized in core modules including General Ledger, Sales Order Processing, AR, Purchase Order Processing, AP and Inventory Control. There are functional (native to local country) and reporting (the one for consolidated financial statements) currencies. However Consolidated statements are typically produced outside of GP in Microsoft Management Reporter or FRx
6. Great Plains in China and Southeast Asia. Technically speaking Dexterity (the shell of Dynamics GP architecture) doesn’t support Unicode and such hieroglyph based languages as Chinese, Japanese or Korean. There is possible work around and if this is what you need then review NJ Star products
7. For additional information, please feel free to call us 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918 (this number works for international customers) or email us help@albaspectrum.com We serve you USA/Canada nationwide via remote support (web sessions and phone/Skype conferences). Local service is available in Western Michigan, Chicagoland, Southern California (LA, Orange County and San Diego) and Houston area of the state of Texas
Andrew Karasev, http://www.albaspectrum.com Great Plains Dynamics GP and eEnterprise Certified Master, Microsoft MVP and consultant with 15 years and plus experience and expertise. Alba Spectrum, 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com. If you are thinking implement Dynamics GP in challenging environment, we recommend you to give us a call
Author Site
5/1/2012
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