developing successful high quality systems consulting services requiring high performance, scalability, and short response times. An excellent educational background provides a solid foundation for the accumulated experience. Combination of strong business and technical skills is one of the most valuable professional capabilities. Experienced in end-to-end projects in several industries including pharma, MRO, manufacturing, e-business, etc. Global templates with rollouts to South America is one the areas of expertise. > View all posts by Persio Eboli A BRAZILIAN SAP ROLLOUT: WHAT TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT BEFORE YOU START? (1/2) WE ASKED OUR REDSOLUTION ASSOCIATE, PERSIO EBOLI, TO TELL US WHAT YOU SHOULD INVOLVE IN YOUR PLANNING PHASE BEFORE YOU START YOUR BRAZILIAN SAP ROLLOUT PROJECT First implementations of SAP in Brazil occurred in the mid-90s when the ofcial localization to the country was released. Even before that there were some cases of SAP project instances, but I would not consider them a full solid implementation. Those were more initiatives around modules not impacted by local legislation or standalone implementations totally independent of the corporate global solution of the company. Around 1996 you could clearly see the start of the rst wave of SAP Brazil implementations in companies already well-established in the country. Localization for Brazil was very unstable and the R/3 release was 3.0F. Even though it was not awless projects as you can imagine, the price of being the pioneers during those early days was well worth it as those companies where the founders and builders of the Brazilian SAP marketplace. Now Id say we are probably in the third wave, the second wave being when the electronic nota scal became mandatory for almost all kind of business. This new boom is happening because of the attention the country is getting from the global business community mainly due to being one of the members of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). Several international companies are starting new operations or expanding their business or just making their Brazilian operation part of the corporate solution. A common question that comes up for these companies is: Is it possible to do an international rollout of my global template to Brazil? A straight answer to this question is: Yes, it is possible and there are several successful examples of this but there are adaptations and points of attention that must be considered for Brazil which I have attempted to list and highlight in this blog post. Many of these points are also relevant for new geographical rollouts to any other countries in the world, so its worth having them in mind as a general reminder when doing your project planning. Besides the cultural specics which you can get an idea of in a previous associate post by Rodrigo Cremonini on Cultural differences when doing international project work in Argentina/LATAM and similar problems with the language that per se represents a change management challenge, there are the business mandatory considerations when doing a Brazilian rollout. In Finance the key points to consider are: > Fiscal Calendar According to Brazilian legislation it is mandatory to use scal calendar K4. Gregorian calendar from January to December. > Taxes Standard SAP does deliver a very good solution for taxes calculation. For both withholding and sales/purchases taxes it does require a lot conguration and maintenance, but it does work well. Using third party software for this purpose might be possible, but denitely unusual. > Payables and Receivables Electronic banking is a reality in Brazil and specic payment methods are required such as boleto, TED, DOC. > Fixed Assets After the SPED implementation in the country it made the xed assets solution even more specic. There is a specic report called CIAP that must read data from FI-AM and also from the nota scal database. > Statutory Reporting Most of the reports are standard delivered by SAP, but it is very common to use third party software to receive SAP data and generate all sets of required reports. > Electronic Nota Fiscal This subject was already discussed in a previous blog by me and it is mandatory for almost all kind of business in Brazil currently. You can nd my previous blog on Nota Fiscal in our RedSolution blog section or press here. FIND OUT MORE AT: www.redcommerce.com linkedin.com/company/red-commerce twitter.com/redcommercesap PERSIO EBOLI Persio Eboli has 14+ years of experience developing successful high quality systems consulting services requiring high performance, scalability, and short response times. An excellent educational background provides a solid foundation for the accumulated experience. Combination of strong business and technical skills is one of the most valuable professional capabilities. Experienced in end-to-end projects in several industries including pharma, MRO, manufacturing, e-business, etc. Global templates with rollouts to South America is one the areas of expertise. > View all posts by Persio Eboli A BRAZILIAN SAP ROLLOUT: WHAT TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT BEFORE YOU START? (2/2) In logistics and product costing: > It is mandatory for manufacturing companies in Brazil to do actual costing for any manufactured product in the country. This forces the use for any product resulting from a PP order, to use standard price and run the material ledger in the end of the period to do the actual costing; > Foreign Trade Export and Import procedures are very specic and normally requires a lot of conguration in LE-TRA or acquisition of a specialized third party software or as last option leave several manual interactions in the system; > Outputs This is normal for every country, but for Brazil it is really required to design specic forms, especially in the foreign trade business; > Sales and Purchasing Pricing Procedures The tax engine is highly integrated to sales and purchasing pricing procedures. It is mandatory in sales to have a specic pricing procedure for Brazil. For purchasing it is just recommended in order to help users to determine the net price/value. Ive mentioned third party software a few times and I wanted to refer to another piece written by Javier Mora on Chilean Electronic invoices where its common practice to use third party suppliers. These are the recommended points worth considering for any project initiative and are a must for Brazil. Follow Dr. Demings PDCA cycle and keep an eye on the mentioned points above, get the right people involved and the Brazil rollout will be a great success. There is a parallel discussion on this topic within our Global SAP Forum on LinkedIN, click here to join and participate. FIND OUT MORE AT: www.redcommerce.com linkedin.com/company/red-commerce twitter.com/redcommercesap