Due to the maintenance challenges brought on by Brazil’s shifting legislation, there is a clear trend among SAP-using enterprises to abandon managing in-house IT solutions. Over the previous few years, a lot of businesses viewed Brazil Nota Fiscal as just another invoice processing and compliance solution that could be handled by internal staff. However, many businesses are finding that the true cost of ownership is very high when they consolidate onto single instances or regional instances of SAP and transfer business functions into shared services. The two most frequent themes I hear from clients wishing to leave an on-premise Nota Fiscal solution are listed below:
- Over the past five years, businesses have expanded through acquisitions in Latin America, particularly in Brazil. Although many of these acquired businesses also used SAP, businesses now had to support multiple instances. As the IT team tackled consolidation, they frequently discovered that placing Brazil into a shared instance had a dramatic impact on their understanding of the true support expenses of Nota Fiscal. The real cost was caused by the quantity of modifications coming from the government and the impact these changes had on SAP settings, not the XML schema or the web service connection. Organizations are turning to suppliers who solve this in-house issue rather than employing several FTE to research the changes, investigate how they should be implemented inside of SAP, and manage the continuous flow of SAP upgrades. They have been using managed services, which keep track of the adjustments, know how to make SAP work with them, and ensure continuing compliance with the SAP system and process for a set annual charge.
- The widespread expansion of required electronic invoicing across Latin America is another factor causing businesses to abandon in-house systems. A worldwide SAP team must manage numerous vendors in various regions because the majority of on-premise software solutions only handle one country. When taken as a whole, supporting numerous FTE for daily support, numerous boxes, numerous integration brokers, and numerous country-specific solutions costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Regional planning not only frees up IT funds, but also the necessary IT resources. Instead of maintaining a national process, resources would be much better off working on new, value-added projects.
Simply put, businesses are switching to managed services because it is becoming too expensive to maintain internal deployments on a daily basis, and more critically, to govern the constant changes that take place every year.