It struck me while travelling to another continent. Suddenly, you notice the importance, when it comes to currencies, language support, time-zone conversion, payment rules, etc. What before, seems pure theory, now had a practical impact on my own situation. However, what is the impact of those parameters for businesses going international?
Within our terminology in SAP ByD, these features and parameters are supported by the Internationalization area of our
Globalization Services. Today, customers can run multi geographic deployments with SAP ByD. More than 6000 companies run productive SAP ByD systems in about 142 countries. In addition, we offer services required for multi-national companies such as regional data centers, multi-language support and local partner ecosystems, to name a few examples of our offering.
As a definition of our support for globally interacting companies, I would like to share the following quote by Nils Buerckel (Product Management Globalization Services):
“The goal of internationalization (i18n) is to ensure the deliverability of software to each place and in each language of the world. More precisely, software internationalization means to meet all technical considerations that need to be solved, when: data is processed (the data virtually may be entered in any language); data or documents are displayed or printed; the product is planned to be delivered to / used in a certain location in the world and the product is planned to be translated (either by SAP or by customer). Overall, proper internationalization implies proper Unicode enabling and support.” You may want to check our
SAP Support note about Unicode.
Let me provide you with a list of some features which I like to highlight, related to internationalization (i18n) at SAP ByD, which correlate to the definition above.
- Date and time handling. Full support of data and time handling including time zones and daylight-saving time switch
- Lexical sort (e.g. words with special characters might be sorted differently. For Asian languages a proper sorting algorithm is more critical than for other languages)
- Address Handling: Support of country specific address formats (e.g. when creating new addresses) and address versions (possibility to store name and address in Latin and in non-Latin characters – especially important for Asian countries). See also SAP note 316331
- Right-to-left (RTL) support: RTL languages like Hebrew / Arabic require significant effort e.g. for the UI to support mirroring of screens, forms, … etc.
- Printing text and paper sizes (e.g. letter versus DIN format)
- Translation tools like SAP ByD Language Adaptation Tool
- Multiple currencies handling
- Date/time/number formats for user settings
- Units of measure
With our latest customer testimonials, we provide examples of international companies running SAP ByD in different countries.
- Fissler - German made cookware. To ensure they can efficiently implement new subsidiaries in strategic markets around the world matching very fast an organization or subsidiary. They rely on SAP Business ByDesign as system to look at the same data and terminology, which improves efficiency.
- Barco – Belgium high-tech company, digitizing their global business with SAP Business ByDesign.
- Galpa_-US company, wholesale distributor with several distribution centers in the US, Mexico, Peru, Costa Rica among others. The value of embedded analytics helps Galpa to better plan their business for different products and locations.
To summarize, our customers get the most important capabilities for their global roll-out with the globalization capabilities available at SAP ByD, namely country
functional scope,
language and internationalization. Those are adding value to
Financial capabilities (like Multi- Company Support, Multiple Set of Books per Company, Financial Statement Consolidation, IFRS, GAAP or GDPR ) or
SAP Trust Center infrastructure. Finally, our growing
Partner ecosystem helps to deliver further customer and country specific requirements.
