SAP Business ByDesign: Localization Roadmap and Outlook 2018.

During the last year, we onboarded many new customers and partners investing on SAP ByD. We move forward with our localization strategy. In this blog, I will share data that reflect the adoption on ByD by countries, localization outlook 2018 and guidelines. Furthermore, I would like to encourage our partner community to get involved in this topic by engaging with our SAP ByD teams.

Our live customers reinforce the message about our product capabilities and scalability to support their internationalization approach with comments I picked from customer success stories, such as: “...can be deployed around the globe quickly and easily” or “…rapid roll out to subsidiaries” or “…Quick go-live of SAP software at its Singapore headquarters as well as at multiple subsidiaries, including China”. Additionally, we have an active ecosystem, supporting more than 55 countries as of today, by using our Localization Toolkit. Other partners are supporting customer specific localization projects. In total, our customers run operations in 130 countries, with about 680 companies running in non-localized countries., posting more than 360 million accounting documents.

Our localization outlook for 2018 follows our product strategy with the objective to remain compliant from a global perspective by delivering and adopting new legal regulations – i.e. IFRS 15 and GDPR– and local legal changes.

• Legal changes and maintenance: As in the past, these are the areas where we concentrate our efforts. Due to several new regulations from Governments in Spain, Mexico, India or Italy, which are pawing the path for new Business to Government models, we adopt local legal changes on delivered SAP ByD country versions. In a few of our pre-localized countries (see screenshot), we have updated VAT for UAE and Saudi Arabia (January 2018). Details on country versions and localization features are updated in every release. Check the release highlights blog 1802 ( 1711) , the updates on globalization capabilities ( European ; APJ, America and Africa and Middle East) or simply check the “What’s new” section at the Help portal.
• Existing country version enhancements: As we increase the number of customers running SAP ByD outside the US and Germany, additional local requirements are requested by customers and partners. Thus, we have increased our focus on legal requirements especially for Italy.
• New countries and viable Go-to-Market approach: We are actively setting up a collaborative working model with countries like South Korea and Israel with local partners and their market unit leaders to address country specific requirements. This effort started last year under controlled availability (see picture). This year, we continue the partner approach, until we take a final decision to add South Korea and Israel to our category of standard countries. We support our new partners selling in APJ and Africa with enablement, guidance and empowerment to use the Localization toolkit and Cloud Application Studio.
• Globalization services: We introduced last year several services, some in pilot phase last year. The Language Adaptation Tool, Service Translation Hub, Legal Change Notification or Localization Toolkit. During Q2, we will communicate details about improvements of these services which are supporting customer roll-out. This year, we are analyzing other standard services (e.g. e-Documents, Tax as a Service) and leveraging SAP Cloud Platform.

I would like to remind the ByD Community to check regularly the channels we support in our roll-out and interact with our experts in our community:

• Use our sap.com and globalization capabilities
• Post your localization questions either in the SAP JAM Localization Group or in the blog
• Follow SAP ByD release highlights
• Explore the Public Roadmap and Help center with the localization Input
• FAQ for SAP ByD Localization