In addition to the country legislation, we are starting a new segment to our Latin American electronic invoicing blog.  We are calling these customer insights.  We will be covering some of the top "Lessons Learned" from our experience with over 250 Latin American SAP and eInvoicing implementations.  This week, I am focusing on the notion that the only way to become compliant is to install OSS notes. There are much easier solutions for multi-nationals.

The Company - Fortune 200 CPG (Food & Beverage) multi-national 

The Problem - This CPG company, much like most large multi-nationals, was moving to a consolidated SAP environment. Meaning that they were consolidating the vast array of legacy systems in multiple countries onto a common platform.  The issue for this company was that their centralized SAP system was following a global upgrade path.  In comparing their current version of SAP (v4.7b) with the requirements of Brazil, they found that they would have to install over 200+ OSS notes to bring their system up to speed. This had major impacts on the core SAP upgrade strategy. When you are consolidating onto a common SAP platform, you do not want to have constantly changing eInvoicing legislation driving your global strategy.  Additionally, there just wasn't enough time to go through all of those upgrades and meet their go-live with Brazil Nota Fiscal Eletronica.

The Solution –  The key is finding a solution which includes a SAP ERP templates that encapsulates all of the unique requirements in the local market without requiring significant changes to the global template.  By utilizing a SAP Rapid Deployment Template, this CPG shop was able to maintain their current global version of SAP and represent the needed differences in separate tables and extensions within the Rapid Deployment Template.  Additionally, this approach will allow the CPG company to upgrade their SAP system on their terms, not on the terms dictated by one countries unique legislation.  Changes to the local requirements are managed within the rapid deployment template which removes the burden of constantly updating your ERP every time the local regulation changes. 

The Lesson -  Latin America's constantly changing eInvoicing legislation should not have to affect your operations and upgrade strategy.  There are alternative solutions that can help you simplify your SAP implementation in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina now, and also buffer your SAP system from the constant changes in the future.