Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Laurent Charpentier, chief innovation officer at Yooz North America.
Accounts payable (AP) clerks at leading companies are already seeing machine-learning programs automate and streamline their daily work, flagging suspicious invoices, reducing cycle time and saving their organizations money. Artificial intelligence is boosting efficiency and making life easier for thousands of AP professionals today. But many of these professionals are undoubtedly wondering if sophisticated software might one day put them out of a job.
Electronic catalogs are a pain in the ass. Twenty years ago, early e-procurement implementations were always dragged down by the work required to build electronic catalogs. And things haven't changed that much. The problem is that you force suppliers to publish (i.e., replicate) catalog content to their buyers’ various system or to electronic marketplaces — unless you use supplier-hosted catalogs that you “punch out” to. This is nearly always implemented as a Level 1 punch out, where the poor buying employee has to click on various supplier icons to get to the right websites where their buying experiences are controlled by the seller (i.e., “guided selling”) rather than the chief procurement officer (CPO) preferred metaphor of guided buying.
The next level of sophistication is a Level 2 punch out, where supplier catalog content sits next to internally curated corporate catalog items before a punch out occurs when the right item is found. The problem, however, is that a supplier still has to syndicate (replicate) all of the content that a CPO wants to expose to corporate employees. And it’s even worse because the type of catalog items in question are broad assortments of infrequently ordered items that make up tail spend. Are you really going to get someone like Amazon Business to syndicate content from hundreds of millions of items to your buy-side catalog? No. Also, the number of suppliers that support Level 2 punch out is extremely low (perhaps fewer than 100 suppliers globally), which is not surprising given that they have to syndicate massive catalogs to multiple channels. Syndication/replication is not a great long-term answer for anyone when an API can be built to serve up the content on demand.
Speaking of Amazon, Coupa has worked with Amazon Business to develop a Coupa solution called Open Buy. The offering changes the paradigm to allow “guided buying” through a more unified experience that actually implements Level 2 punch outs properly in a way that’s palatable to the CPO, employees and the supplier (i.e., Amazon Business doesn’t currently support the existing Level 2 punch out scheme — and we don’t blame them). In this Spend Matters PRO brief, we’ll examine how Coupa Open Buy works, how it’s different and some strategic implications for the market.
E-procurement is essentially what is sounds like. The same goes for e-invoicing, too. But when you add payments to the equation, things get messy.
Whether procurement and finance organizations are looking for an integrated procure-to-pay (P2P) solution or standalone invoice-to-pay (I2P) technology, the notion of either solution incorporating end-to-end payment and reconciliation capability is misleading at best. Granted, some providers, such as SAP Ariba and Coupa, have taken steps toward enabling the payment lifecycle through partnerships. But their payment solutions focus on the outcome rather than providing a broader toolbox around payment process management and reconciliation for buyers and suppliers alike.
How can these vendors, which deal predominantly in indirect goods, influence the total payment picture?
This Spend Matters PRO research series unearths the often misunderstood components of the “second P” in P2P. We start with a high-level overview of what procurement systems do (and do not) do today to enable payment processes, as well as what procurement’s responsibilities for payments are (and are not). We also profile what SAP Ariba and Coupa are enabling on the payments front, as well as the general approaches of other vendors.
Subsequent briefs in the series will provide a detailed summary of best-in-class e-procurement and e-invoicing native payment capability and integrations to enable payments, a detailed overview of the invoice to reconciliation process, an exploration of P2P and payments best practices, and guides for how to set up suppliers for payment in a system, the integration of cash management and payments, how to think about trade financing and payments, and the role of shared services in payments.
It's now 2017 and your procurement resolution should be to get with the latest and greatest in real-time procurement data and technology. The result will transform your organization as well as your team's role in shaping the procurement function. In this three-part recorded webinar series, Spend Matters' Xavier Olivera, along with a series of guests from Aquiire and the LDS Church, discusses the benefits of data in real-time and how you can use it to your advantage.
A supplier can have the best product or service in the world, but if it never appears somewhere the end user can become aware of it, it will never be purchased. Hence the importance of what logistics professionals call “the last mile” in physical supply chains — the final leg of the transportation journey that delivers a product or service to the consumer. The concept of the last mile applies to corporate purchasing, as well.
Technology and solution providers typically deliver electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) compliance offerings as a component rather than the central focus of an overall procure-to-pay (P2P) or accounts payable automation solution. Few vendors focus squarely on compliance as the central value proposition of their offering. But one provider does offer invoicing compliance “as a service”: TrustWeaver. Yet TrustWeaver is “consumed” by organizations as an integrated component of third-party P2P and e-invoicing solutions rather than directly. This research brief explores precisely what TrustWeaver enables from a compliance perspective in its current summer 2017 offering. Also included are insights into additional TrustWeaver compliance capabilities that the provider plans to add during 2H 2017.
This brief provides checklists to understand specific areas of e-invoicing compliance centered on three areas: local laws and regulations, invoice processing and value-added services. In this context, it describes what localized e-invoicing compliance requirements TrustWeaver supports and those it does not support. In this brief, our goal is to help procurement and finance organizations understand what precisely a vendor means when it says it is a “TrustWeaver” partner — and what other steps they (or their solution partner) may need to take to ensure broader compliance requirements are met.
Just what defines “compliant electronic invoicing” continues to be one of the least understood areas of procure-to-pay (P2P) solutions. One of the reasons for this is that many technology providers — not limited to just P2P providers but also accounts payable automation vendors — hawk compliance as if it were a bag of peanuts in the hand of a vendor at a baseball game. In reality, however, few single solutions even approach “full compliance” on a global, or even localized, basis.
The challenge for buyers of technology or managed services e-invoicing solutions is that when we address the topic of e-invoicing compliance, we’re talking about a complex barrel of goodies (the metaphorical equivalent of nuts, candy and fruit), not just a ballpark freshly roasted (or generically bagged) special. Further complicating the topic of e-invoicing compliance is that we must fully address both buyer- and supplier-led compliance depending on whether someone is on the issuing or receiving side of an invoice — the two are not the same.
It's a bit late for spring cleaning, but when it comes to your procurement processes, there is no time better than the present to get current and get organized. Presenting a 3-part recorded webinar learning series from Spend Matters and Aquiire: Transforming Procurement in Real Time. Spend Matters' Xavier Olivera is joined by a series of guests, including from LDS Church, to discuss the benefits of real-time data and how practitioners and their peers are using it to their advantage.
What if a network of suppliers responded even more favorably to a customer that persistently and artfully manages them? Almost all of the analysts who cover the supplier performance management (SPM) solution market agree there is an incremental 5%–15% in contract savings for those who do it well (i.e., for buying organizations that apply a continuous improvement discipline to their SPM practice). Those are big numbers. So why would it appear that outside of the automotive industry, sophisticated SPM practice hasn’t caught on?
Our colleague David Gustin recently published a post detailing the results of a study on supply chain financing over at Trade Financing Matters, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand the insights gained related to procure-to-pay (P2P) processes and solutions. In his article "5 Hypotheses Tested on Supplier Use of Supply Chain Finance", Gustin explores some conclusions from a study developed by Prof. David Wuttke of EBS Business School together with Prof. Eve Rosenzweig of Emory and Prof. H. Sebastian Heese of North Carolina State University where they observed patterns of conduct on the subject of supply chain financing.
Just about every solution provider with an e-invoicing or procure-to-pay (P2P) solution talks about compliance in the invoice-to-pay — and sometimes order-to-cash — area. Many often use language that would suggest their “unique” approach is a source of competitive advantage when it comes to complying with local government regulations. But all too often providers are referring to just having a digital signature or signing capability (often in part or in whole outsourced or certified by a third party) for the purposes of proving authenticity and certification of origin. Beyond this, there are other forms of e-invoicing compliance, such as complying with local VAT requirements and the archiving of invoices for audit purposes (e.g., the number of years varies depending on the country).
But compliance is even more nuanced than just simply checking the box on one or more of these areas for a particular country, and just having an agreement with TrustWeaver does not mean it is fully compliant for a specific transaction scenario. Depending on how tightly one wants to define compliance, it is also necessary to meet not only inter-country requirements but also intra-country (and intra-regional) requirements. This includes scenarios in countries where a submitted e-invoice requires a previous clearance by tax administrations and where part of the regulation requires that additional attachments be added to transactional documents in the invoice-to-pay process, as is the case in some Latin American and Asian countries.
This Spend Matters PRO brief explores components of what true e-invoicing compliance is — or should be. It starts by taking a look at the basics, including what TrustWeaver certification provides vendors (and their customers) with. Yet our approach is not just to address the basics, even though they are important. Rather, we take aim at the myth of vendor e-invoicing compliance that permeates the market today and what a broader definition and approach to compliance should encompass. The second installment in this brief will explore what specific steps vendors such as SAP Ariba, Coupa, Taulia, Tradeshift and others are doing beyond the norm to provide compliant solutions for trading partners.
To say that most middle-to-large-market companies now understand the business case for spend management is probably fair, but as many know well, issues remain. Eating chicken wings between flights in an airport the other day, I stumbled into a conversation with a principal from a procure-to-pay (P2P) system integration firm called RiseNow. While that may sound fishy to you, the wings were actually garlic-parmesan, and the discussion turned out to be refreshingly candid, if not a little inspiring.
