Overview of the 1C:ERP WE international version functionality

The 1C: ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) program line, including ERP RF and ERP WE solutions, is an effective way to build company management systems on the modern 1C: Enterprise 8 (1C: Enterprise 8) platform.

The programs have incorporated the best international methodologies and many years of Russian practice in many industries and have over 5.000 implementations. International ERP WE was detached from Russian ERP RF and is being improved in sync as a separate project.

The 1C: ERP WE system provides consolidation of business processes and information resources of the company into one mechanism and at a low cost of ownership to ensure:

- planning, accounting, data collection and processing in all areas of the company's work;

- supplies and fulfillment of liabilities just in time;

- getting relevant and accurate information from a unified, consistent base for management-decisions making at all levels;

- role-based access and user interaction, active integration with external data sources and services.

The article aims to describe the functionality of the 1C: ERP WE international version for top managers of global companies thinking about automating their international business. Additionally, you can read the article “ERP 2.5 and ERP WE comparison. Which to choose?”

But first let us consider that the technological foundation of ERP WE development, as well as all 1C programs, is the 1C: Enterprise platform.

1. 1C: Enterprise 8 Platform - the technological basis for ERP WE constructing

The 1C platform is both:

● the program environment in which the 1C application solution code is executed.

● development environment with its programming language and tools for developing the latest applications with advanced communication capabilities.

1C architecture includes components that define the rules of design, construction, and improvement of 1C information systems. The figure below gives an idea of the breadth of capabilities provided by the technology components of the platform. For the interested reader, the components are also described in the table below.

Fig. 1 Architecture of 1C:Enterprise 8

Table. Description of 1C platform architecture components.

Remote work and interaction tools

· Publishing information databases on a web server provides users with the ability to access the information database via the Internet from a computer or mobile device running Android, iOS, and Windows operating systems.

· Integration of the interaction system with Telegram messenger ( using Telegram-bot) and VKontakte social network, for example, to organize sales by messengers.

· The system of cooperation with colleagues is a built-in program “1C: Collaboration Server”, which provides for sending text messages, sharing files, organizing audio and video conferences, as well as demonstrating the screen of your computer during a video call.

· Remote administration of 1C servers.

· Security and authentication features - working over a secure channel when interacting with a web server, complicated user passwords, a single login and password for access to several information bases.

· A wide range of key technologies built into the platform for integration with external systems: JSON, proprietary REST HTTP services, OData, HTTP queries, WEB-services, XML, Exchange Plans, FTP and mail protocols, Enterprise Service Bus., etc.

Rapid business application development tools

· Designer - a rapid application development environment and maintenance of programs.

· Subject-oriented of the environment - availability of meta-data objects for solving the tasks of provisioning, warehousing, accounting, management accounting, payroll, data analysis, and management at the level of business processes.

· New modern development environment for 1C system application solutions - 1C 8 Enterprise Development Tools (EDT), created based on the open development environment Eclipse.

Scalability and productivity

· Building corporate systems with tens of thousands of simultaneously working users.

· Application server cluster with dynamic load balancing fault tolerance.

Flexibility and customization

· Customisation for the needs of a particular business, adaptation to new management and accounting needs.

· Functionality extension without changing the main code of a standard solution with the help of the extensions mechanism.

· Self-implementation by the company's analysts and IT specialists, including setting up user roles and interface, customizing forms and report options, regulatory tasks, etc.

Support tools for large corporate systems

· Availability of a specialized programme product “1C:Corporate development package” (CDP). The CDP provides multi-user load tests without the participation of real users, assessment of system applicability in given conditions, assessment of system scalability, selection of server hardware and software, etc.

Cross-platform capabilities work with various DBMS

· Deployment of 1C application servers in Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.

· Work on thin clients 1C in Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.

· Work with mobile clients 1C on Android, iOS, and Windows.

· Work on 1C web client in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge.

· Work with databases on Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Oracle Database and file DBMS of own 1C development.

Cloud solutions, work via the Internet

· Ability to deploy 1C platform and applications in the cloud of an organization, or holding company and access them via the Internet.

· Ability to deploy cloud services with 1C solutions on the Fresh portal 1cfresh.com under the SaaS model.

Development for mobile devices

· Creation of 1C applications running on tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices running Android, iOS and Windows.

· Development of mobile applications in 1C development environments (Designer, 1C:EDT) using their own platform for 1C mobile applications.

Comfortable user interface

· Automatic customization of the interface depending on the enabled functionality and user roles.

· Interface mechanisms of the 1C platform ensure easy learning and high speed of users' work, customization of the interface “for yourself”.

Integration

· Ability to integrate with external programs and equipment using open standards and data transfer protocols: JSON, REST interface, HTTP services, WEB services, XML documents, XDTO, Exchange Plans, work with FTP, HTTP, and Email, work with files, with DBF-databases, etc.

· Integration with popular commercial and enterprise equipment in ERP WE.

· The mechanism of distributed information bases DIB provides for the creation of geographically distributed systems on the 1C platform.

Administrator's tools

Information Security

· Access rights system: roles, restriction of access to data at the recording level.

· Authentication mechanisms for administrators.

· Cryptography mechanisms (via crypto providers) - electronic signature, document encryption.

Business Intelligence

· A data layout system with a ‘’constructor‘’ for creating reports without programming, operating on metadata, andlayout settings.

· A query mechanism with tabular data access is a variant of the SQL query language.

· A large selection of diagrams to graphically reflect data for interactive analyses.

· Generation of summary reports with transcription by another report (drill-down).

· 1C: Analytics - BI-system for interactive work with analytical data and management accounting. Integrates with ERP WE. Provides viewing of charts and dashboards, editing, filters, design, data disclosure, etc.

Language localization

· The programming languages are Russian and English. ERP WE is written using the language constructs of the Russian language. But the code and solution objects are translated into English, also to attract English programmers.

· Platform interface languages - 22 languages.

· Configuration interface languages - ERP WE has 4 languages: Russian, English, Polish, and Italian.

· Regional settings include setting formats for showing date, time, numbers, and logical constants that influence the sorting order of rows. There are also custom formats for the country.

· Availability of documentation and training resources - mainly in Russian. Development of English-language documentation and training courses has been started.

Interaction system

· Sending text messages, sharing files, organizing discussions, audio and video conferencing, and screen sharing during a video call.

· The discussion mechanism is realized in client-server architecture using the built-in 1C: Collaboration Server program.

Automated testing

· Emulates users' interactive actions and checks the results of these actions by running the client application in a special mode.

Other platform mechanisms

· Full-text search; Data history and versioning; Database copy mechanism for analysis; External component technology in any programming language, in particular for connecting sales equipment.

External data sources

· Connection to external databases outside the information base via ODBC connector. When working with Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, PostgreSQL and Oracle Database, full capabilities of the 1C query language are provided. When working with other DBMSs, the query language is limited by the ODBC-driver capabilities.

2. Overview of the ERP WE international version's main functions

In terms of construction logic, the international version of ERP WE consists of functional units (ERP subsystems) that connect all processes into a single optimized system. Each unit realizes a section of accounting and/or related functions that together ensure the functioning of all the company's departments.

The ERP WE user interface includes user function units (listed in the figure below). Let us consider the purpose of the ERP WE user unit.

Note: A more detailed overview of each block, with a list of the functions provided and explanatory screenshots of the ERP WE screen, will be given in the ERP WE articles.

Fig. 2 ERP WE subsystems

Budgeting and planning

The ERP WE subsystem contains two interrelated functionalities:

1. budgeting - financial planning and management, including a) fixing future incomes, costs, and cash flows in the form of budgets and b) monitoring of the company's budget targets.

2. product planning - creating and maintaining plans for sales, production, assembly, material, and product purchases for various scenarios. The plans are used to create collateral orders. Product planning is one of the 3 supply tools, along with the mechanism for maintaining stock balances and orders to order.

For the ERP user:

● Budgeting is a management tool for the CFO and his services. However financial planning involves all the financial responsibility centers of the company: cost centers, income centers, marginal income centers, profit centers, and investment centers.

● Product planning is a tool of the company's operational departments: sales, purchasing, production, and warehousing.

CRM and marketing

This ERP WE subsystem is aimed at maximum usage of each customer and partner potential in the company's interests. The unit is closely connected with the ‘Sales’ unit, where the conditions for customer sales are set using CRM settings.

The ERP unit contains tools for regulating sales processes, customer segmentation, constructing pricing policies, discounts, and bonus programs, handling customer complaints, and questionnaires, managing the assortment of retail shops, and conducting marketing activities.

The ERP unit's functionality is used by the wholesale and marketing departments, the retail sales department and related services.

Sales

The ERP WE sales management subsystem covers the needs of the company's sales departments. At the same time, wholesale and retail sales are divided. Wholesale sales are integrated with the ERP Warehouse and Delivery block.

Wholesale provides:

● build a distribution network using flexible settings and pricing policies, shipping and payment terms, control of credit limits and payment deferrals, contractual work, and data analysis using a reporting subsystem;

● to perform operational work with each customer, including control of collateral status and settlement status, reservation of goods under the customer's order, control of sales conditions when managers draw up documents, the printing of accompanying documents, certificates, etc;

● plan sales by nomenclature, nomenclature categories, including seasonality (CRM settings).

Retail sales are:

● Deployment of retail sales complexes for shops and supermarkets, using assortment management, cashier/salesman workstation, connection of any cash register equipment, warehouses with reference storage, all known methods of increasing customer loyalty - discount cards, gift vouchers, bonus programs, etc.

Purchases

The ERP WE purchase management subsystem solves two important tasks:

1. calculating and meeting the company's ‘just-in-time’ needs for goods and services;

2. interaction with suppliers on purchase and payment for goods and services, including contractual work.

The ERP WE unit covers the needs of a company's purchasing departments. Here are some of the features:

● Supporting all stages of the Purchasing Manager's work, including tracking the status of supplier relationships, goods in transit and uninvoiced deliveries, accepting goods into safekeeping, etc;

● preparation of purchases, contracts, purchase terms and conditions, maintenance of nomenclature and supplier prices;

● integration with the “Warehouse and Delivery” unit and “Purchase” (CRM customization);

● use of methods and schemes for ensuring requirements, and methods of maintaining 1C stocks.

Warehouse and delivery

The ERP WE subsystem contains two interconnected functionalities:

1. management of warehouses of different types - simple warehouses and addressable warehouses with complex topology and placement/selection rules - WMS warehouse management;

1. delivery - organization of delivery to the customer/the carrier, from the supplier/from the carrier, by the carrier.

The functionality of warehouses provides work of managers and warehouse workers, and supports all warehouse documents and operations, including work via the data collection terminal:

● acceptance of goods, including the calculation of cell placement;

● shipment from the warehouse, including from cell picking calculations;

● movements, make-ups, inventory, including barcoding;

● assembling/disassembling kits;

● integration with ‘Delivery’ provides for the sequence of loading goods into transport vehicles, taking into account the delivery route.

The functionality of the ERP delivery system block provides the work of transport logisticians and provides the following: to set delivery zones, transport vehicles and their characteristics, to draw up transport assignments, to assemble goods according to transport assignments, and control the delivery status.

Production

The ERP WE subsystem is used to manage customized, small batch, serial production in various areas. The ERP system unit supports both the production and assembly of new products and repair production when a product is disassembled, repaired, partially utilized, and possibly reassembled into a repaired product.

The ERP WE unit supports the work of production personnel at different stages of production:

● Technological preparation of production - preparation of resource specifications, technological operations, orders for replacement of materials, and work centers.

● At two levels of management:

1. at the inter-shop level, the chief dispatcher works: he forms production orders, assesses resource availability and schedules calculations, forms and dispatches production stages;

2. shop supervisors work at the shop floor level: they are responsible for the execution of production operations, including management using shift assignments. The shop floor level may also be used to plan and execute operations on an operation-by-operation basis.

● By analyzing and detailed calculation of the cost of production and works, including direct production (materials, payroll) and indirect production costs.

● Production without ordering.

● In preparation of planning calculations for preliminary estimation of production orders and resource specifications, plan-fact analysis of the cost of manufactured products.

Treasury

Purpose of the ERP WE subsystem:

a) Operational planning and control of cash flow in the context of cash flow items; b) performing bank and cash operations; c) reconciliation of mutual settlements and work with debts; d) working with credit, deposit, and loan agreements; e) working with accountable persons.

The main users of ERP WE Treasury are accounting personnel, who are provided with tools such as:

● the document ‘Expenditure request’, its coordination and approval;

● payment calendar for operational financial management and planning;

● setting and controlling cash limits;

● offsetting/cash write-offs and preparation of reconciliation statements;

● cash and bank operations, including acquiring;

● work with accountants, advance reports;

● accounting for loan and deposit agreements.

Financial result and controlling

The financial result is created from revenue and other income less the cost of production, management and sales organization costs and other costs.

The functionality of the ERP and cost accounting block is based on a clear cost accounting concept and cost allocation methodology, which is based on a batch accounting mechanism, income and expense items with different allocation rules.

The financial result is calculated for all business operations for the period/month by the automated procedure “Month Closing”.

The main users of the section are employees of financial services, accounting departments, and specialists in management accounting.

A special group of users are managers of different levels of the company. They are provided with aggregated data on various indicators of the company's performance using the Performance dashboard. The monitor implements the concept of management by objectives - Balanced Scorecard (BSC).

The monitor provides the ability to set some targets, record deviations from them, use various options for analyzing the targets and, most importantly, reflect the company's performance in the form of an interactive analytical dashboard with visual diagrams:

Fig. 3 Interactive analytical dashboard in the 1С:ERP WE

Fixed assets

The subsystem supports management and international accounting of BPA, namely: fixed assets, construction objects, NMA and R&D.

Provides a complete list of documents on the formation of the initial cost, acceptance for accounting, operation, depreciation, write-off, rental, and leasing of VNA.

Separately, there is the functionality of repair equipment - operational objects, which are used in production shops to produce products. Repair objects are owned and leased fixed assets. It uses planning of repair works, operating time indicators, accounting of repair costs, and calculation of production costs. The functionality is integrated with the Production section.

Financial accounting

The IFА subsystem performs the following tasks:

● Reflection of operational accounting documents in financial accounting.

● Reporting Preparation:

a) by the principles of International Financial Reporting Standards;

b) under IFRS-based management accounting rules.

Receive the following reporting forms at any frequency:

1) statement of financial position;

2) statement of comprehensive income;

3) statement of changes in equity;

4) statement of cash flows;

5) notes to the financial statements.

The ERP WE unit of ERP regulated reporting has been excluded from ERP WE. Some of the current excluded functionality has been transferred to the IFA unit (read below).

Master data and settings

The subsystem performs:

● customization of the overall functionality of ERP WE;

● entry of the main catalogs most responsible for the system functionality: Organizations, Nomenclature Classifiers, Partners, Company Structure, Bank Accounts, Warehouses, Cashiers, etc;

● other system-wide settings and operations, for example, entering initial balances at the moment of system start-up, entering users and setting up access rights, connecting external reports and processing, etc.

Other options for users

The international version of ERP WE includes many other features. These are summarized below:

● Entry of initial balances as of the date of system start-up. These are balanced balances of goods in warehouses, cash balances on bank accounts and cash desks, the status of mutual settlements with counterparties, authorized capital and others.

● Working with email, sending SMS, creating notes and reminders.

● Sending personalized reports based on information database according to schedule.

● Work with files of any format that can be attached to documents, or catalogs.

● Setting up and customization of any sales and cash equipment: cash registers, barcode scanners, customer displays, electronic scales, and data collection terminals.

● Versioning - keeping the history of changes to database objects.

● Edit prohibition - prohibition to modify the system data from some date.

● Schedule jobs - running data processing procedures on a schedule in the background, for example, classifying customers, updating segments, deleting irrelevant data, launching budget tasks, etc.

● Distributed information bases - deployment of geographically remote peripheral bases with synchronization of changes with the central base - the central node.

● Electronic document exchange with contractors using electronic signature and encryption.

Integration with 1C: Document Management system is planned. Integration is performed by settings. In fact, as part of ERP WE we get a powerful document management functionality, etc.

3. Multi-country accounting capabilities of 1C:ERP WE

1C Company carries out purposeful work for effective multi-country usage of 1C: ERP WE system:

1. Delocalisation of enterprise data was carried out.

2. Work is underway to internationalize development. The ERP WE beta version 2.5.7.180 already includes two separate solutions (and two ERP WE demo databases) with synchronized code in Russian and English.

3. Work has been done in the direction of multi-linguality of the interface and data. Up to 3 languages can be used simultaneously in one database (full-fledged use of languages requires limitation by the value ‘3’):

• one main language for data and interface (for example, Russian or English) plus

• two additional languages for the interface and multi-lingual data (for example, Polish and Italian).

1. Internationalization of bank accounts is planned with support for 34-digit accounts in the international IBAN format.

2. You can access ERP WE via a mobile client (Android, iOS) with support for the English interface (according to the language of the device).

3. Work has been done to develop multi-currency, international financial accounting, and IFRS reporting, specifics of accounting in Western countries. This is noted in the article “ERP 2.5 and ERP WE comparison. Which to choose?”

To this purpose, the “VAT Accounting Unit” is made universal and sufficient to be quickly adapted to national specifics, to integrate data into an external tax reporting system or to outsource data.

The VAT accounting unit provides:

● set flexible VAT rates;

● allocate input VAT to different tax regimes;

● VAT accounting for advances has been realized. The functionality is now applicable both for European law and in the Russian Federation;

● VAT-exempt and VAT-exempt activities are combined through separate accounting of VAT on purchases;

● added the “Turnovers by VAT” report for incoming and outgoing VAT to replace the purchase and sales ledger.

The functionality of the international financial accounting unit has been significantly expanded.

To fill in the functionality of regulated accounting and to meet the features of European accounting practices, the following have been added: maintaining multiple charts of accounts and multi-currency accounting for a) simultaneous maintenance of the national chart of accounts and the IFA chart of accounts;

● using a different chart of accounts for different organizations, including the transition to a new chart of accounts from a certain date;

● quantitative accounting by the chart of accounts;

● the usual balance sheet., account card, account analysis, etc. by the chart of accounts;

● the downloadable financial model is now in English (fills in a chart of accounts, posting templates, cost items, costing, and other catalogs);

● the entire operational control loop is reflected in financial accounting accounts - full synchronization with operational accounting documents;

● audit trail tracking, prohibition of afterward editing;

● Standard costing

● the possibility of using flexible digitization (numbers with 15 digits or more) - for countries with hyperinflation.

Improvements have been made in the salary calculation. Salary calculation is country-specific and is not performed in the international version of 1C: ERP WE. In this regard, the document for the recognition of labor costs “Reporting salaries in financial accounting” has been adapted to national legal requirements.

This document provides payroll data from national systems and can be filled in manually or by piecework in production. It provides:

● reflect accruals and taxes on labor remuneration;

● flexibly allocate salary and tax costs to direct and indirect expenses using cost items;

● import payroll calculations from other systems and Excel.

Adaptability of 1C:ERP WE version to national systems, standards and legislation of individual countries facilitates the work of 1C specialists, developers and programmers to deploy the system in these countries.

Join the community of international 1C:ERP WE.

Koderline specialist