SAP Business ByDesign Brings Cloud CRM/ERP to Subsidiaries

Problem: you’re a multinational corporation with subsidiaries all over the globe (bear with me, here), and you want one SaaS solution that integrates data across every branch of your enterprise. SAP has announced one potential solution with Business ByDesign for Subsidiaries, designed to leverage the full SaaS SAP portfolio in a way that keeps financial data consolidated, synced and on the same platform as the company headquarters.

According to the press release announcing Business ByDesign for Subsidiaries, SAFECHEM, a subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, itself opened a North American subsidiary only recently. Within six weeks, it was able to use SAP Business ByDesign for Subsidiaries to start tracking business transactions following U.S. GAAP, including sales and use tax reporting. And it’s all integrated with the figurative mothership’s financial structures.

Similarly, mobile order and information management solution company Nokia Tej was able to leverage SAP ByDesign CRM to reduce the amount of data that was being duplicated between its system and Nokia headquarters. The press release noted Nokia is backing Nokia Tej as its SMB play, and the company is praising SAP for helping it get up and running and integrated quickly.

The subsidiary feature set is included in SAP ByDesign feature pack 2.6, and the company is promoting it as “the first integration scenario for financial consolidation, master data synchronization and purchasing.” And down the road, SAP is expecting feature pack 3.0 to add more ERP scenarios for logistics.

For SAP partners, this offering could help gain some market leverage into the large enterprise space. But it’s likely not going to help cloud service providers who make their living on the SMB space.

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