TAX TECHNOLOGY CASE STUDY
CLIENT
DMA’s client, a large multi-national healthcare provider, was in need of functional and technical implementation services for its five unique and separate legal entities.
CHALLENGE
The client’s technical counterparts and corporate headquarters are located in Germany, which required communication with the client’s team outside of normal working hours and the ability to perform tasks within the confinement of its internal policies.
SOLUTION
The tax technology implementation involved upgrading the client’s Vertex Q Series environment to Vertex O Series, integrating with the five disparate SAP business systems through a phased Go-Live approach. DMA began the engagement by obtaining a copy of the client’s existing Q Series TDM file as the foundation, but also by conducting interviews of the business and tax professionals to understand the key goals and objectives of the implementation project. To ensure the tax department obtained the desired functionality and enhancements to its existing landscape, DMA engaged in a core infrastructure build and design.
During this time, we listened to the client to gain a better understanding of not only the current processes, but also of enhancement opportunities. The high-level design captured at the commencement of the project provided DMA with the ability to engineer a solution during the first entity’s implementation that would grant flexibility to seamlessly insert additional entities into the Vertex landscape with little reengineering or redesign.
As each entity utilized the global SAP template for data, the purchasing transactions portion of the project required DMA to not only understand the purchasing types, but also the true intent and usage of each Material Group, as it could differ between businesses. DMA also provided a taxability matrix for purchasing and sales transactions of each business. During the discovery meetings with master data and business representatives, DMA identified six different data elements that were required to obtain the granularity necessary in identifying what was purchased and how the purchase was used within the business. The configurations of these six data elements that DMA made within the client’s system ensured the tax calculation would reduce overpayment and underpayment scenarios the day of go-live.
RESULT
For this client, DMA developed an agnostic solution with the flexibility of data additions into the future. To address the issue of data elements required for calculation and reporting purposes that do not pass from SAP to Vertex O Series as part of the standard integration component, DMA’s ABAP developers performed the necessary User Exit coding required to conform to the tax policies and procedures identified throughout the requirement and design phases of the project.
WHY DMA?
Recently, the client acquired another entity. The robust flexibility deployed within the DMA design provided the ability to seamlessly consume the acquired company into the Vertex configurations in parallel with the global SAP initiative.
OUR EXPERTISE
