Creating only one or several invoice smartforms for a global company

[Jarmo_Tuominen]

Hi,

I'd like to hear your thoughts how smartform development should be arranged for a global company. Let's take an invoice as an example.

A global company has several divisions, company codes, plants and sales organizations. Invoices are printed in different languages in several countries.

Of course it would be better to build exactly one smartform for everything, but on the other hand, the smartform would be extreme complex and difficult to maintain in future, since each company has slightly different requirements for the invoice. On the other hand, it doesn't make any sense to just keep on creating a new smartform for each country, since at the end you will have tens of almost identical smartforms which doesn't sound good either.

What is your experience--should one try to build exactly one smartform for all the company codes, or would it be better to create a new smartform for each company code? In general, I would say that the latter one is perhaps a better approach.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Jarmo Tuominen

Edited by: Jarmo Tuominen on Mar 1, 2008 12:17 PM

[Former Member]

Hi,

It would be better if you maintain only one form since you said there are slight changes . For language conversion you can maintain in text modules. No need to develop different forms.

Regards,

Nageswar

[Jarmo_Tuominen]

My first thought was that it is better to maintain only one form for everything.

However, I am aware that there are also opposite opinions. They explain that creating one form for everything is not the best approach. Because of this, I would like to understand the reasons for that. Do others have any other point of views?