Abstract: During the past years, I have been talking in several blogs and recently in the 2020 localization roadmap and outlook, about the SAP ByD strategy approach for different countries and supporting subsidiaries’ roll-out for our customers all around the world. In this blog, I would like to focus on the so-called “pre-localized” country category, the instant value you get out of the system, the approach we follow with this category, but also the limitations you need to be aware of when implementing any of the “pre-localized” countries. We aim to reach additional transparency for our ecosystem in the SAP ByD roll-out and want to give guidance on how to execute certain implementation projects in those countries. The definition of the country key in the SAP system does not have to match political or government entities.

NEW: (updated on June 2, 2020) Additional pre-localized country features include: Greece. In addition to updated information about Finland. Check detailed information inside the blog.

First, let me remind you how we define pre-localized countries and why there will be a difference in the country features offered.

A Pre-Localized Country version offers partial localization features and enables you to use SAP Business ByDesign in a consistent and integrated way to manage your business. Pre-localized countries can be scoped in the business configuration labelled as Pre-Localized Country Version. The content delivered differs for each country, but it addresses mainly taxes, customer facing forms (not in local language) or financial accounting. In addition, several country independent features available at SAP ByD, in the area of logistic forms, customer facing payment forms, migration tools for SEPA, flexible tax configuration, document numbering flexibility or employee hiring among many others. Our ecosystem will play an important advantage as some local requirements will be filled in by our partner innovation

The first wave of pre-localized countries was created out of customer specific projects, where several years ago SAP provided support in features below and decided to expose for other customers. Even though we keep our development focus in standard country categories, the market will determine if other countries- with less complex localization requirements and partner country add-on approach – could be added to, if this facilitates the customers business operations.

BUT customer and/or partners would need to leverage the Localization Toolkit to extend or adapt the SAP Business ByDesign capabilities in order to provide a locally-compliant solution for these countries and use Language Adaptation tool for translation to local language, if requested by customer practices. SAP ByD team is committed to maintain existing features released with any of the pre-localized countries (see examples below) but will not proactively develop any new legal change or requirement gathered as default but as an exceptional case by case analysis. On these countries we collaborate with partners as the first stop to discuss those customer requirements in pre-localized countries. Check additional information in our FAQ for Localization

In general, looking at the value and flexibility which SAP ByD delivers with our localization strategy approach, about 30% total of our productive customers by countries run outside any of the standard localized countries by SAP, being about 16 % in any of the pre-localized countries and summing to 14% on Tax basic countries. Thus, we will continue to look at what additional value can be added by our ecosystem (or in some special cases by SAP) to customers, to support their business in these countries.

Below you get a list of country feature details, but many others will be announced in our Product Release Roadmap.

Greece

Poland

Lithuania

Latvia

Egypt

Morocco

Finland

Estonia

Singapore

Hong Kong, China

Malaysia

United Arab Emirates

Norway

Sweden

Thailand