Food and beverage industry in a DSD environment
Updated November 25, 2019
Food and beverage industry in a DSD environment
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Vertex Indirect Tax O Series
Overall Satisfaction with Vertex
O Series is used in the procurement and the order to cash processes. CONA is an IT service provider to the 12 largest Coca-Cola bottlers in North America. We have an on-premise solution with 15 partitions for the various legal entities services by CONA. We continue to have challenges in the sweetened beverage, deposit compliance and general sales tax on the Order to cash side. Vertex helps with the changing taxation rules across North America and we continue to partner with Vertex for new taxes in the beverage industry as these types of taxes are usually open for interpretation.
- Manage customer tax exemptions through the creation of certificate records. We pass this information back to SAP for the determination of taxes for nonexempt customers.
- Vertex teams continue to up to date with respect to sales tax changes and new passed legislation.
- O series offered web services that we utilized for Certificate information that is passed from a 3rd party tax exemption certificate application. the web services created the certificate record in O series that is then utilized in the OTC process.
- Vertex teams stay on top of new legislation but in the past CONA team was presented with new changes in the soft drink business and the rules were not available in O Series.
- CONA team has a number of rules that we manage as a result of rules that were not ready for deployments for the Beverage business. We then work with the Vertex team on have them host the rule and at that point we back out our custom rules. We have a lot of local rules which should be addressed through standard rules in O Series.
- CONA team continues to work with the support organization in support of our deployment across the US. The beverage industry is unique and ever-changing so we would expect a more focused support model as the rules in O series should support this various legislation.
- Vertex O series reduces the manual efforts to maintain various tax rates across North America.
- Price
- Product Features
- Vendor Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
CONA team selected Vertex O Series as this product supports the procurement and sales tax solutions, integrated/Certified to SAP and offers certificate records as the beverage industry has a large volume of exempt customers.
We have used Vertex for the PTP processes for a number of years and we recently moved the OTC/SD processes the alternative approach was a manual effort for the SD processes which was used with our legacy system but this was not an option moving forward as it was extremely manual in maintaining the rates with pricing conditions. The challenge was the offline solution as the Vertex lite for the driver handheld required a large storage capacity that the existing handhelds could not support. We built our own custom offline solution and continues to use Vertex o series for the online calls.
- CONA services have used Vertex O Series in an innovative manner in the VAT and deposit compliance challenges in Canada.
- CONA services received an innovation award with Vertex for the driver handheld offline solution that supports offline tax calculations when there are changes to the shipment at point of delivery.
- CONA is innovative when it comes to various rules as the beverage industry has complex rules that are open for interpretation. We have scenarios where the O Series rule and not approved by the Coke Bottler in that area in NA. we build out our own rules when the O Series rules are challenges and not agreed upon by the bottlers.
CONA services were struggling with performance as there is a massive amount of data processed in our O Series instance. We have 15 partitions for the various legal entities in our multi-tenant environment. We engaged the support organization for an architecture review. The team lad by Naun provided guidance on how we should structure our infrastructure and how to manage the various servers for the reporting and active data. He assisted with an archiving approach and we now have a stable solution.
- SAP ECC.
- Readsoft.
- Concur.