When a large semi-conductor company in North America wished to have a simple system that integrated their tax information on inventories, Ephlux provided just that – an integration of JD Edwards with a cloud based tax-service provider.
The Tax of the Matter
A large Japanese company, renowned for its semiconductor distribution around the US, has an impressive client list that includes companies like Intel, Broadcom and top of the line hardware manufacturers. Providing provide world class technical support and solutions like complete video transport, this company rules North America with its expertise in design services, IP, applications support, and logistics.
This organization, serving the silicon industry for over 40 years has the magic of presenting high density, high speed complex FPGA designs utilizing multiple IP cores with fast time to market requirements. Dealing with a unique combination of technical support, IP technology, and design services, this organization had to deal with a warehouse of inventories – and the taxes associated with them. It wished to have a real-time integration of applicable Tax information with their inventory.
Tax Troubles
Dealing with Sales Tax can be complex, confusing and time-consuming. With more than 10,000 taxing jurisdictions, and thousands of rate and rule changes each year, it’s a daunting challenge to figure out what to expect — or when, or where.
What has become a dire necessity is having an end-to-end sales tax compliance solution that knows all the rules, handles all the calculations, and smoothly aligns with the current sales tax workflow – and also integrates easily with the most popular ERP’s accounting, e-commerce and point of sales systems, enhancing the company’s technology investment. Accurate sales and use tax calculations are now a reality using precise rates and taxability data from right within the ERP system and that’s the kind of promise this company needed from Ephlux.
Is Good Tax a reality?
To be effective from a tax perspective, a successful implementation required ERP professionals who specialize in tax and can effectively address a corporate tax function’s particular needs, requirements, and obligations. A well-designed integrated tax system can merge all information into one, efficient system organized by function. Such a system can be designed to ultimately work in tandem with technology to offer around-the-clock customer service and Internet filing, providing one-stop tax processing.
Ephlux helped the organization produce the critical tax-relevant data and information needed to streamline the tax compliance processes, more effectively identify and implement tax planning, and provide better tax examination support. With improved capture processing and reporting throughout the tax processes, a solution based on Business Services (BSSV) was developed that builds a communication bridge between traditional JDE tools such as interactive app & UBEs to receive real-time tax information for a given asset from a 3rd party cloud-based tax-service provider Avalara. External web services were developed and deployed, invoked through business function from JDE and thus providing a centralized mechanism for any traditional JDE tool to request and receive the required information.
Tax in the Cloud:
The whole process required integration with an external service provider that would provide tax related services. The real-time service integration in question required building non-traditional tools for integrating with an external service. Ephlux worked in coordination with Avalara Integration – a sales tax SaaS provider, and successfully developed the system.