An approach to enhance data management and reports in Multi-lingual ERP applications

To sustain and beat the market competition, organizations are not only impelled to explore emerging economies, but have been considering `mergers and acquisitions´ as a strategy. Organizations use various Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to support their functions in planning, manufacturing, sales, marketing, customer relationships, finance, human resource management, supply chain and logistics, e-business and other similar functions. This leads to handling of very large datasets which may be stored in distributed and discrete manner. These organizations make decisions based on the reports generated from such databases. Although, organizations maintain an ERP system that automates the business processes and generate reports, the report may still have issues with its completeness. This paper attempts to discuss and address the following areas of concerns: a) Localization invariably results in challenges during report generation and data consolidation. b) The scope of the customized reports is limited to the requirement specified by the organization at a point in time of ERP implementation, and the organization may have to entail additional efforts (efforts involve additional costs) to ensure the reports remain current. c) During data migration, manual data mapping and translation for database is involved to a greater extent. This paper recommends an approach that could be adopted by the ERP application vendors to handle the variations in data with the use of recent technologies and thus, attempt to address the above issues by offering field level data transliteration as an Out of the box feature (OOTB).