Corporate ERP on Dynamics AX Deployment with Hub and Spokes Architecture

In certain business development scenarios you, as IT director of mid-market company have to respect existing structure and plan the evolution.

This is especially true when your company expands in the way of acquisitions. Additional complication might be attributed to international business model, where you are acquiring established enterprise in the foreign country. In this small paper we would like to come through some popular theories and recommendations, where we suppose that you have Dynamics AX or formerly known as Axapta in your headquarters. If you are in Corporate ERP selection mode, we recommend you to consider AX in the case, when your policy is leaning toward Microsoft Dynamics products and technologies:

1.Why AX? First of all this ERP and MRP platform is recommended by Microsoft for the implementations in such industries as meat, fish and sea products, poultry, mining and oil drilling, distribution and logistics and with new version 2012 in public sector (GL fund management logic). In Microsoft Dynamics ERP family AX is probably the only offer (native from MBS, not third party ISV) for so-called Process Manufacturing. PM is where you know incoming raw materials, but exact output is not precisely known. Good examples would be meat processing facility, timber mill, precious metal mining. Second point in our opinion is its localization in major word regions and countries. It supports Unicode based alphabets (typically requiring hieroglyphs: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese). It is available in such countries as Russian Federation, Europe, South East Asia, Arabic world, Brazil and both Americas. Microsoft supports its local country versions, including issuing regular tax updates

2.OK, we got Axapta in USA Headquarters. In other countries we got mixture of accounting packages. How do we exercise control and do such important things as consolidated financial reporting? There might be two recommendations. First one is export GL trial balance to Excel worksheet from your international accounting applications (nowadays everything could be exported into Excel, right?). Then you use Excel in your FRx or Microsoft Management Reporter based consolidated P&L, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flow. This solution doesnt give you all the details in General Ledger. If you would like to see GL transactions, consider overnight export and shipping via ftp upload to your central server, from where you import these transactions into GL only shadow Axapta company database. These methods sometimes are referred as hub-and-spokes, where you have high end central ERP system and consolidate the variety of the accounting databases via financial statements or by abstracting to GL level only

3.Phased Evolution. When you deploy hub-and-spokes as a transition to something more controllable next is to plan what it could be. It might not be practical to force AX implementation in every foreign or regional office, due to the business volume limitations. If you have market watch type of activity somewhere in Kazakhstan or Central Asia the scale of the ERP implementation budget should be proportional. The idea to keep the gamut of local packages is not the way to go, as it requires too much supervision or micromanagement. Plus, this way allows foreign managers to keep central control from the headquarters potentially weakened. We do recommend select global small business package. In our opinion good candidate is SAP Business One. It is available worldwide in translated and localized versions. Plus you can host it in the Headquarters and expose to international users via Citrix, VPN, Microsoft Terminal Server or similar technologies. This method allows you to exercise maximal control and save on IT support. Lets now come through individual countries

4.Brazil. Both AX and SB1 are localized and popular here. If you came here via acquisition, you might have local accounting packages. One of the most popular is Microsiga. There is also some circulation of Dynamics NAV or former Navision. If you think about something like Great Plains or currently Dynamics GP we would like to discourage you. Brazilian tax compliance is pretty complex and there is very strong local regulation, including electronic federal and state authorities notification. GP is not localized in Brazil and we do not recommend to do localization in-house

5.Russian Federation. If you are expanding to Siberia, Moscow, or Russian regions here we recommend AX, SAP Business One, NAV has reasonably support. Popular local package is 1S Bukhgalteria (1C Accounting as it translates from Russian language). Here in RF foreign investments are typically found in mining industries, including gold, silver, aluminum, oil & gas in all of these Process Manufacturing is pretty helpful. There is good connection to expand to such lucrative markets as Kazakhstan (a lot of opportunities for minerals, oil and gas, mining), Uzbekistan (mining, including Uranium near Bukhara), Turkmenistan (oil and gas), Azerbaijan (Caspian Oil). This region is definitely promising. However the risk is high, including emerging market factors. Large pool of multinational companies is still in market watch and discovery mode, where large scale ERP system is not required. So, if this is your case, consider SAP B1

6.China. Microsoft Business Solutions has AX localized and translated to Chinese. SAP is matching this offer with local version of Business One. If you have dare plan to establish manufacturing mill here, review AX production functionality

7.Arabic speaking countries. Please, note that SAP Business One is not translated to Arabic at this time

8.Openness to being customized. Traditionally large scale Corporate ERP implementation projects require reasonable or even large number of software development hours. You should make your homework and familiarize yourself with such concepts as MorphX (Integrated Development Environment), X++ (programming language). Current version is 2012 (composing these lines in June of 2011). X++ is similar by its grammar to other popular C style languages, such as C++, Java, Microsoft C#. However its encouraging first glance simplicity might be misleading. This language also is coupled with AX forms, tables, its three tier architecture (developer should have control where the code is executed: application server, end user workstation application, database server). Having said that it is good news that Axapta is open to generic programmer and they could understand its code. However, consider outsourcing X++ software development projects to professional MorphX partner with proven records

9.Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese. Our core expertise is in International Business