NAV 2009 W1 - World Wide Version Roll Out - Pros and Cons

Nokio

Hello,
our company have 6 subsidiaries in different countries an we plan to expand further.
For 2013 we want to upgrade our NAV System (4.0 SP3) and bring it back to "standard". The aim is to make as little as possible customization and establish a branch solution.
In the medium term we want to reduce our costs (f.e. development) and unify our solution for every subsidiary. That's why we are thinking about to establish a NAV W1 version with a special branch solution for every subsidiary.
My question is, if someone have already done this step and what expirience you won? What are the Pros and the Cons for a W1 version instead of every subsidiary has its own country version.

Best Regards
Nokio

davmac1

I am living with the results of W1 used in all countries and I don't like it.
Each country is a "branch" solution made by Microsoft. When you attempt to localize W1 yourself, you end up doing the same work, usually not as well.
I recommend starting with the version that has already been localized for each country, then standardizing your company mods so they can be more easily merged with the country version.
Since W1 is the base, use W1 for developing standard mods for all your companies.

alsol

Hi Nokio,

We currently do something similar (Upgrade from 3.7 to NAV 2009 in 15 countries) and I think it depends very much on how your company is organized. The more you have standardized accross your operations and the more group standards you have established the easier it will be to implement a worldwide standard. But if your local databases have been implemented independently, maybe even by local partners it will almost not be possible to bring them all together with an upgrade.

It also depends on the countries your subsidiaries are located. If they are in countries like DE, AT, CH, UK and also US, CA a global standard based on W1 is much easier to implement. For the US the most critical part is the Sales Tax, since the full Sales Tax functionality cannot be provided by the W1 version. If you deal with countries like FR, ES, CZ, IT, TR it is not that easy as each localization for these countries has a lot of features which are really required by the government. If we are talking about IN, CN, RU I would hardly recommand to use an available localization because the localization is so complex.

In general the Microsoft approach is always to have seperate databases for each country. But in my opinion this is not realistic and I haven't seen an environment where each country localization had its own database. If you have further questions, please let me know

Nokio

Hi alsol,
we have for every country an separate database but every country has its own dynamics partner. there are not really much customizations, but there are some.
ATM I don't know what the best approach for a world wide NAV solution is. I say extra world wide NAV solution, as maybe it is better to follow the approach W1 + localized country objects + company branch solution.

But what I want to avoid is that every country makes its own customization on the system, so that next upgrades would be more cost expensive.

What do you think?

rhpnt

Go with the MS localized version for each country.

rhpnt

alsol wrote:

In general the Microsoft approach is always to have seperate databases for each country.

And it's the right one. How else can you keep the various localizations apart ("mortal coding" excluded)?

alsol wrote:

But in my opinion this is not realistic and I haven't seen an environment where each country localization had its own database.

Then you haven't been around much. A separate database for every localization is very much realistic in fact I would say it's more the other way around.

ThomasHej_MSFT

One DB per country version is the official approach.

There are several reasons for that, but the most important one is that it allows us to have the implementation of individual localizations (country versions) use different database schemas. Put otherwise: We can add/remove/change fields and tables in one version independent of others.

The discussion is really about finding the right balance between, the simplest lowest common denominator version (one version with what all countries can agree on) and the really bulky contains-it-all version (with all localizations in one version). Neither of these extremes will be a perfect hit.

We have chosen to develop specific localized version for each country and carefully consider which features we - often inspired by local functionality - decide to develop in W1.

Now all that being said - I recognize that it would be very nice if one version could fit all, and we are working hard to move us in that direction, but I can't guarantee that we will ever get there.

Let's start with agreeing of the alphabet size and sorting: I say Æ comes right after Z... :shock: