How do we do sales in MX while still working under US Set of books?

Question

Hi,
We are on 11.5.10.2. We have following requirement and need your inputs. Unfortunately it involves customization and we are open to it. Please suggest.
We have sales happening in US and Mexico (MX). Current implementation has just 1 Set of Books defined and it is US-SOB. There are 2 Legal entities viz. US-LE & MX-LE. US caters to large number of customers and there are various channels for receiving those orders into our ERP. MX has very few customers and MX orders are created manually using US responsibilities. Picking/Shipping/invoicing documentation etc is generated in 3rd party systems and goods are shipped from MX. Mexico then charges the US entity as Internal customer and Intercompany AR is raised by MX to recover the manufacturing cost. This AR invoice is manually posted to MX-LE.
Business has now decided to up the sales in MX and cannot rely on the manual order creation, documentation process. They are quite familiar with the Sales cycle followed for US orders and want to create similar process for MX without creating a new SOB & Operating Unit! They want to use the US OM responsibilities to create MX orders manually. There are lot of 3rd party systems involved and environment is heavily customized. So, creation of new SOB would impact those systems and it will be a big project to roll out new SOB in Oracle and in those systems. So this option is ruled out.
There is a criteria to identify MX orders (based on ship-to, bill-to). We are now looking for a custom solution which will help us process the MX orders, create the AR invoice and then strip the MX sales data from the US-SOB at the end of month. Can we define new order type(s) for MX orders and associate an AR transaction type to the new order type(s) that has MX Revenue & COGS a/c on it? We want to capture the sales happening in MX separately and generate our own AR invoices. The 1st segment of the accounting structure is Company which identifies whether it's US or MX.
Any suggestion in this regard will be helpful for us to start with.
Thanks!

Answer 1

the most transparent way would be to set up an ipsec vpn allowing secure access to your ny system, in effect you would be giving her direct accesss to your lan
doing this properly requires some work
at your ny site i'd use a router to support inbound vpn connection as well as your general internet access and firewalling (if your existing router cannot do this you'll need a new one)
at the remote end, the mac has built-in vpn support, so as long as a compatible vpn router is used then it is straightforward
an additional benefit of this approach is that you would all be able to use the same vpn to get remote access to your ny network when travelling/at home etc.
a device like this... http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/WiredVPNFirewallRouters/FVS318.aspx
...might be suitable, but if you are not comfortable doing it in-house i strongly recommend discussing requirements in detail with a competent systems integrator, getting things wrong could compromise your security
as a short term solution to the file type changing on upload/download, if you use zip (or stuffit) to create a .zip (or .sit) archive of the files, then upload the archive, when you download and unzip i think the file type will be preserved