Time for e-invoicing to learn from the railways
Posted on: July 18, 2011
Service providers sit together
When you pick up the phone, you don’t worry about whether Vodafone and Orange have worked out how to pass your call between them. If you jump on a train at London’s St Pancras station, destination Gare du Nord, Paris, you’re not concerned about whether it can run on French rails (not when you have strikes, leaves and the wrong kind of snow to worry about first).
So when you’re encouraging suppliers to submit invoices electronically, why do you have to consider which networks they’ve already signed up to?
One of the challenges for the growth of e-invoicing is how service providers interoperate. It’s the subject of many discussions and articles, and a topic surfaced regularly at e-Invoicing Europe 2011 earlier this month.
To give the subject proper attention we invited representatives from the leading e-invoicing solution providers, Ariba, Basware, Certipost, OB10 and Tradeshift, plus Charles Bryant who is part of the Euro Banking Association and has detailed knowledge of this area, to respond to questions from our delegates and our chair, Simon Dunn, Head of Group Supply Systems at HSBC.
Not only did Simon draw on his own experiences dealing with limited interoperability, but he also wove in the demands from an audience of fellow end users. With panellists playing nicely, on the most part they covered four broad areas and challenges:
- The need for standards (or not)
- Cross-border, cross-network compliance
- The business case
- Transport versus content
While there’s some interoperability happening today, there’s still a long way yet to go before electronic invoicing networks interact like mobile networks. That said, none of the service providers thought that the challenge was insurmountable, which will come as good news to end users who certainly expect interoperability to become a reality, in some shape or form, in the future.
Read full coverage of the panel session in our article The e-invoicing interoperability debate on sharedserviceslink.com.
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