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Baz: Hello everybody thanks for tuning in to the first LatamReady NetSuite webinar. Of course, we have our usual suspects today’s Carlos Z, our owner and president CEO of LatamReady and of course Mr. Glenn Haesendonckx our sales manager at LatamReady. Today we want to focus on thinking globally and acting locally. This is a concept that we want a lot of companies to think about when implementing NetSuite in their company. First of all, how are you doing today gentlemen?
Carlos: Great! Just arriving from Miami
Baz: How many hours is that from Lima Peru?
Carlos: It’s about a six-hour flight
Baz: That’s about three movies on the plane or a good book!
Carlos: We arrived from a nice event in Aventura called FOMLA, the festival of media it was a great space for sharing our message, wasn’t it?
Glenn: Yes it was great so we showcased there for about three days, basically we were the only company at the event representing an ERP, in our case it’s NetSuite. It was a great space for us because there are so many multinational companies all based in Miami and a lot of them do business in Latin America which is kind of what we do, so it was a lot of fun to represent our company.
Baz: It was an event for media companies, and we also cover media companies as well.
Carlos: Sure we have many beautiful customers in that space. For example, Venevision in Miami is one of our biggest customers on the East Coast. In the West Coast, we have Entravision which is working all across Latin America.
Glenn: Don’t forget about Taboola in New York
Carlos: You’re right, they’re a very nice group of customers.
Baz: We have some videos about us talking at FOMLA on YouTube, they’re older videos but you guys could check them out in our channel called LatamReady. I want to begin this webinar with the concept of thinking globally acting locally. Why can’t business leaders just focus on local markets right now? What’s the importance of thinking globally and acting locally?
Carlos: As you know Baz, the world has changed. Now Miami based corporations shouldn’t be thinking about Florida as the whole universe for having customers or making business. Now they have the opportunity to grow all across Latin America thanks for what they have in Miami, they have a multicultural space with multicultural teams. Also, great access to money and they have the opportunity to grow all across Latin America. The global opportunity is there. To think global act local is something that our customers in Miami should start thinking since the beginning when structuring and operating their companies.
Baz: This is a follow-up question. So when a company starts operating, why is it important for them to think globally instead of locally first?
Glenn: Let’s talk related to NetSuite. Each company needs to look for an ERP to implement in their business. It’s so easy today for a company to not only operate in the US but outside of the US as well. Obviously, our space is the Latin American field. As soon as the company starts operating globally they need to think about getting a system in place from the beginning that’s going to help expand and grow along, and that will be able to adapt to specific requirements.
Carlos: Talking about financial statements, at that stage, NetSuite becomes a great tool for that expansion in the world and Latin America. Financial statements could be structured inside of NetSuite. You’ll find that using a specific feature from NetSuite called multibook, our customers are able to set a primary book to be understood by Miami corporation team and also set books for the local teams in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, etc. That’s very important. How our customers are acting global but thinking local through a tool.
Baz: Through a single tool!
Glenn: That’s very well explained!
Baz: I know that multi-booking is always a question lot of clients ask. What is Multi-booking, how can it help you, and what does NetSuite do with Multi-booking?
Glenn: That’s a good question. In the NetSuite space, Multibook is a functionality that allows us to avoid double accounting. Generally, what you would see in a global company they will do separate systems to operate their business and to comply with what the local government requires (maybe specific reporting they need to deliver on a monthly basis.) Having one single system that has a functionality like Multibook, allows us to record transactions in multiple accounting languages, instead of using separate systems, and building a system that’s not integrated at all.
Carlos: The way I explain this to our customers is, Multibook is like a translator. It’s translating an accounting journal from a company operating in Peru following Peruvian rules, into the way an American accountant is going to look at the same transaction. It’s like an accounting translator built inside of NetSuite.
Glenn: As you know in the US, they follow the US GAP. In certain countries in Latin America that’s not the case. In Colombia, we have a local GAP that is statutory by the government. So if I’m a company based in the US and I have a subsidiary in Colombia, and someone in Colombia makes a transaction obviously I want to see that transaction in US GAP language because I want to look at my financial statements in a certain way. This way I can make decisions about my company and know how to move forward. This transaction using the multiple features allows me to translate that US GAP language but also local language.
Carlos: Exactly! Speaking about the acting global and thinking local foundation for financial statements, how important is it to have those foundations in the right moment? In your perspective which is the right moment to establish those foundations?
Glenn: At the beginning! Most of the companies that we call, they all use very simple accounting software. Most of them use QuickBooks, some of them use something like Microsoft Dynamics. These companies are growing and they’re global, they’re not only in the US they do business around different parts of the world. The reason why we call them is because we know from our experience that as soon as you start growing, it is important to lay a foundation at the beginning. When I say laying a foundation, I mean implementing an actual ERP, not just accounting software. A software that will take control of any aspect of your business. Why is that important? Because it allows you to build business processes along with your ERP. The ERP can basically provide you best practices. On the other side of the spectrum, you would have a company that doesn’t have any software, has all of the business processes defined, and then they want to implement an ERP. The first thing they will want to do is to translate what they already have created inside of that ERP, instead of taking the best practices of an ERP.
Carlos: And we have good examples of that, for example our customer ESA Latin America. They are now a company of 30 or 40 users all across Latin America in eight countries. They are now using NetSuite in all of them.
Glenn: That’s a very good example! For a company like that it’s a strong commitment and a strong investment as well, but it’s definitely working. If you would do this in that same company five years later that’s a completely different story. There would be no way for us to implement a software in three months once they have all those business processes already defined.
Carlos: A good example on the opposite side one of our international customers, Michael Page. They’re implementing NetSuite in 40 countries, five or six with us in the Latin American space. This is a two-year project and the challenge is to change the foundations to think global and act locally.
Glenn: It always goes back to the accounting software. Why do people implement ERP? Because of productivity, lower costs and also because of visibility and control. When the company starts growing they to have access to a platform like that to operate their business online, because it allows them to make decisions not so much on gut feeling, but actual numbers that you get out of your financial statements. The more you go towards an ERP like NetSuite that can be used globally, the more value you can get out of the financial side of things.
Baz: I want to clearly define, for viewers, how does NetSuite give you visibility? What is that?
Carlos: When you ask about visibility in the NetSuite context, I think the answer is the financial statement, balance sheet, and the profit and loss. Once our customer gets to the point of looking at a financial statement in US GAAP, in US dollars, in English, in Miami, and that customer is able to scroll down and look at the Brazilian operations in US dollars in US GAAP and understand in their own language what’s happening with that subsidiary. That person can jump to the local book and find that same information, in the local currency and in the local GAAP. That’s when we complete visibility that all our customers are looking for when they start implementing NetSuite.
Baz: That means seeing all your operations in one screen
Glenn: Visibility is very much related to thinking global and acting local. We are basically talking about the same thing. Visibility is financial statements. Control is having a business system in place which you can use in any aspect of your operations. When we think locally, we think about having local accounting languages for reporting reasons. It all makes sense
Baz: I like how you explained that because it’s a helpful snippet for whoever is watching right now and is asking themselves what is visibility. Earlier you both mentioned a few companies that we work with. What makes them trust us?
Carlos: First of all, what they find with LatamReady, and obviously with NetSuite, is a strong commitment to the concept of thinking globally and acting locally. Just to give you an example, we participated in a contest held by a big prospect from Canada. We were in our Miami office filling out the list of requirements, and I told Glenn, I’m sure we are the only ones answering these questions with a smile on our faces. Every single requirement that the prospect was asking for, was part of what NetSuite offers by standard, or was part of what we offer.
Glenn: One of the statements from the CEO of NetSuite was, they want to offer people a platform that they will never have to change in their lives, if they do a million dollars in revenue or ten billion dollars in revenue and no matter how big their operations grow, they should be able to manage it with NetSuite at any time from the start until the end.
Carlos: What we are finding in our new customers who trust in our message is, they find a mature solution in the cloud space. Our customers find that NetSuite is a company that’s been working for 20 years in this space and it’s the first cloud ERP. On the other side, LatamReady is offering experience in the multi latin companies for the last ten years. With that comes a lot of experience. (…) How can we implement financial statements in order to get visibility? How can they structure their operations in a shared service center based in one specific country in Latin America, instead of having many teams spread in many countries?
Baz: Do you have any comments on that?
Glenn: To complement what Carlos is saying, it’s very difficult in general for a company to find one single system that can be deployed all over the world. Five years ago you couldn’t do something like that. You would need separate software, in each country for them to compliant with the requirements of those countries.
Baz: A lot of companies are still doing that right now!
Glenn: Exactly! (…) what they’re doing initially, and now what we do for them and why they trust us so much is because we tell them to switch to a software like NetSuite and make sure that you can manage anything (financials, inventory management, manufacturing, e-commerce, a CRM) all of them in one single space and it can be deployed and localized all over the world, it’s a beautiful thing!
Baz: Yes it is! I totally agree.
Carlos: Take the example of TODO1, one of our customers based in Miami. We have started a project with them for Colombia. We can get them to function Colombia in a few weeks, that’s different from what we find in the traditional space. Traditionally you will find that every single project for a new subsidiary takes months! Instead of weeks or days.
Baz: What are the things that companies who plan on expanding internationally need be aware of?
Carlos: The first temptation they will find is to continue using Quickbooks or local software with their new latin subsidiaries like they do in Miami. A few years later they will have four or five subsidiaries but they will have lost visibility and control. Now they have a problem.
Glenn: Remember that doing something like has an effect. You don’t have any real-time visibility. Using external software also means that you don’t have any control over what’s happening. A company would have to wait until the end of the month maybe until the end of the quarter for that subsidiary to send them over some data so they can manually put it in their system, to get some visibility. This is not ideal at all. Even less when you are in a strong competitive environment where everyone is growing and you need to make decisions fast
Carlos: Think about what’s going to happen with the financial statements? That consolidation takes many hours and a huge amount of work. What you will find in the financial statements perspective is that a local team is going to work with local software, with local results, in a local language, following local rules. Those local financial statements have to be translated into a US GAP format or the corporation format. The corporation needs to understand what’s happening in the subsidiary. That work takes weeks maybe months. They are losing consistency, visibility and a single way of working.
Glenn: That’s a good point. One of the reasons why a company would implement something like NetSuite is to stop focusing so much on work and start focusing more on business. If you don’t have business processes defined and an ERP like that, there’s going to be a lot of manual work. You’ll have a lot of people working for working, not so many people doing business.
Carlos: That’s true. Take Venevision for example, one of our customers based in Miami. They started an operation based in Colombia. That translation takes weeks. And as Glenn was saying, they are focused on getting new customers and on getting new business for the subsidiary, instead of being focused on which accounting software to use, how to structure their company and how to get control of that subsidiary five thousand miles from here.
Baz: That was very interesting. I want to go on to the next question. We’ve mentioned the previous companies we have worked with before, in a broad spectrum what is NetSuite doing to help them? Take for example Michael Page, what is NetSuite doing to help them? How are they growing? Let’s talk about that in detail.
Carlos: What we are finding now that Oracle is part of the equation with NetSuite, we are seeing more capabilities as part of standard NetSuite functionalities. For example, Multibook is now in place so all our users can have it installed. NetSuite is giving more features for us to develop. A good example is electronic invoicing. We have connected NetSuite to local e-invoicing suppliers through a platform provided by NetSuite.
Baz: That gives them agility!
Carlos: With that technical environment that NetSuite is providing, we are also developing new things on the localization side of our business. In this new version, we are adding twelve or thirteen new legal reports for different companies in Latin America. Now we are supporting withholding taxes, always using NetSuite as a platform.
Glenn: To give a simpler answer to your question and to summarize that, how are we helping a company like Michael Page? Is the same reason: optimize, optimize, optimize. And always keep making everything simpler and simpler. Instead of multiple systems, one system. Instead of many processes, fewer processes. Instead of many people, fewer people. We are always making things simpler and it makes more logic to grow control, visibility, and productivity.
Carlos: And in that direction, what LatamReady is doing is providing training via LatamDojo. LatamDojo is our online learning platform. It’s an initiative that’s there because of the same reason. We want to make things simpler for our customers.
Baz: Our multi latin customers, with multi latin subsidiaries based in the US. We do have webinars in regards to our LatamReady localizations. Those are also monthly, give us a call 786 600 2641 to know when the next webinar is. You can check out our website it’s awesome, we’re constantly updating it. Going back to acting global thinking local, we have a lot of questions. What is one of the most important things a company needs to know when starting off with a new ERP?
Carlos: When a company chooses an ERP and is thinking about growing internationally, not only in Latin America, foundations are very important in order to be able to grow. What we always see with our Miami customers is that they start using Quickbooks, because it’s easier, faster, cheaper.
Glenn: Most of the companies that recently start up they use something simple like Quickbooks. Quickbooks obviously is very well known, it’s a logical step for a company to implement software like Quickbooks.
Carlos: Once they start growing they realize that correct foundation for thinking global and acting local is found in NetSuite. There they can add new subsidiaries and add new processes in minutes, days or weeks. Instead of big investments which take months or years.
Baz: Carlos, is there anything I’m forgetting?
Carlos: Going back to financial statements, I think it’s very important to understand what is NetSuite offering to our customers. To be able to have a financial statement in place, to be able to access a US financial statement as well as a transaction made in another country. NetSuite is offering the platform, so customers can operate in multiple books. As Glenn explained, Multi-booking is in place in order to be able to have transactions in different accounting principles at the same time. Also, NetSuite is offering a very complete set of tools for financial reporting. Visibility means to have financial statements in my own language in the way that I want to understand my company. It happens all the time. The way we understand our sales team, the way we understand what we want to do with our customers. That’s part of what NetSuite is offering, customizable tools that provide us with financial statements in my own language.
Baz: You can move thing around and manage that yourself.
Carlos: You can set up financial statements in different segments, so our customers can understand the reality of what’s happening in different perspectives. For example, the geographical or business perspective, or the chart of accounts perspective. That’s something NetSuite is offering that’s very different from Quickbooks or Microsoft.
Baz: NetSuite used to just be NetSuite. Then Oracle came along and bought NetSuite. How does the acquisition of NetSuite by Oracle affect the growth of companies?
Glenn: Basically the answer is global expansion. NetSuite used to be a company based in San Francisco, still is now but they have offices all over the world. They have offices in all over the world, in Germany, Brazil, Uruguay, etc. They have an office somewhere in Asia I’m not sure where. Basically NetSuite is their own guinea pig. NetSuite runs on NetSuite. They are the perfect example of everything that we’ve been talking about today. So what has Oracle done for NetSuite? To summarize, Oracle has given NetSuite the power to expand quickly, globally, take advantage over the competitors and sell a lot more.
Carlos: Exactly and for you to know, the developing team and the product team from NetSuite is now twice as big as it used to be in the past. So NetSuite is having more fuel to the fire.
Glenn: The acquisition by Oracle has been very positive. NetSuite is a totally independent business unit, but that’s a lot better because of the global aspect. And that’s exactly what we are trying to sell to companies. The idea that going global is so easy today just make sure you get the right platform in place, so you do it quicker than the competition, have more control and visibility so you can make the right decisions.
Baz: So now NetSuite is in 199 countries, is that correct?
Carlos: Yes, NetSuite is in almost 200 countries! Thanks to a joint work with LatamReady, it’s present in fourteen countries.
Baz: It was ten, twelve before, now it’s fourteen! We’re growing!
Glenn: Think of NetSuite as an ERP that should be able to be deployed in any country. That’s NetSuite’s vision. Their mission is to have an ERP that can be deployed anywhere in the world.
Carlos: The last step is to have that financial statement in place following US rules, US language, US dollars, etc. And then drill down to that financial statement following local rules, local currency, local language. What is our competition doing to get to that point? Microsoft for example, which is present all across Latin America, is now switching to a different model. They used a model that used to require local servers for local countries and then consolidate that in a centralized server. With that old technology, they required local teams to localize tax compliance in those local servers. As you could imagine this is kind of complex. Many local and different servers and many local and different tax compliance companies, and then consolidate that in the US. What NetSuite is offering that’s different is that everything is on the cloud. There is a single server in the US and multi latin partners ,like LatamReady, or other partners around the world are localizing the same NetSuite instant with a SuiteApp. That’s a powerful concept, a SuiteApp works like an App on your iPhone, one single program, one single software that all global users can share. That’s the power of NetSuite.
Baz: That’s actually very interesting! How NetSuite can help you grow in that sense.
Carlos: And talking about growing, Brazil is something that’s blooming
Glenn: Yes we close new customers in Brazil very often now, because of the fact that it’s such a big market. For our viewers to understand, why do we focus on the Latin American market? Because it’s expanding! There’s millions of people and businesses and international corporations expanding into Latin America because they see the opportunity, and we take advantage of that opportunity to make sure NetSuite is localized for those countries.
Baz: We’re working very hard to make NetSuite work in Brazil as well, because it’s a complex Latin American country.
Carlos: Yes it’s complex. But the good news is that we as a team have been working in the localization tax compliance space for many years, and Brazil is our twelfth country localizing it’s not something new for us.
Baz: What can customers look forward to and expect from LatamReady in the next twelve months?
Carlos: We are expanding our set of legal ledgers. I think this year we are going to have more than twenty legal ledgers for many Latin American countries especially for Brazil. We now have more than ten electronic invoicing connections for local countries. Do you remember Glenn, when that customer sent us a list of countries they required electronic invoicing for? And guess what? We ticked all of them off. That’s something that we are investing on a lot. We are also working on a LatamReady module called Latamtax which is for holding and managing withholding taxes. As you may know, withholding taxes are something new and different in Latin America, they have a lot of rules and scenarios. It will be ready to be implemented by our customers this month. I think we already have four or five customers using this new module. We are also connecting NetSuite with local tax authorities via our new module called LatamHub. We have also connected NetSuite with a tax agency in Argentina in order to update withholding tax rates in NetSuite.
Baz: This is the reason why we have planned this webinar this week. We want a lot of people to join in and. We want to send out this message because it’s so important for them to know that LatamReady provides these services and functionalities for NetSuite. We have called so many companies to get them to know about NetSuite and inform them about the possibility of having financial consolidation and one single system to manage their multi latin company.
Carlos: It’s also necessary for our customers to get NetSuite’s message of thinking global and acting local. It’s part of what we do and of our lives. We’re always excited to share that message.
Baz: Is there anything that we are excited about?
Carlos: I’m more than excited about the next version. We’re working very hard on that, we are considering the features our customers are requiring from us. I’ll just say that we are going to have huge announcements about our new version, we are improving our performance and electronic invoicing capabilities, more legal ledgers are going to be there. We’ll have about twenty electronic payment formats that the number will keep increasing!
Baz: You seem excited too Glenn!
Glenn: I’m excited for our customers! I’m excited about getting their feedback when they go live. All of the customers we’ve had recently have given such good feedback, which is always great. As a sales manager to see what you actually sell is also something that customers get very happy about!
Baz: To our viewers, if there’s something you want us to fix on NetSuite, or whatever functions you think would be best for you let us know! Our lines are always open you can call Glenn, Carlos or myself. You can also email us or send us a video, we want to get that solution for you very quickly.
Carlos: The time to think globally is now, thanks a lot!
Baz: There’s a lot that we covered. If you guys want more information give us a call at 786 600 2641. You can also check out our website. We have another monthly webinar, the next one about NetSuite is on December 7th at 2pm EST. Check our adverts online LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram YouTube all the social media platforms that we have. Thank you, everybody, for joining in!
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