Posts Tagged ‘electronic Invoicing’
When will Oracle buy OB10?
Posted on: May 28, 2012
The developments in the past week have begged many questions. Various parties have different views on whether the SAP purchase of Ariba is a ‘good’ thing or a ‘bad’ thing.
One question has been ‘how do you think OB10 (Ariba’s main competitor in e-invoicing) will react?’.
OB10 was founded in 2000 and has had in excess of $50 million invested in the company through various rounds of funding.
Why is this important?
With rounds of funding, come a pool of investors who will want to realise a high return on their investment at the earliest point.
The news of SAP buying Ariba for $4.3 billion (looking to close the deal third quarter this year) will have inevitably excited investors in networks like OB10 and Tradeshift.
The excitement comes from the multiple applied by SAP to the buy-price. Ariba’s revenues are $444 million, so the deal comes in at ten times revenue.
If this is applied to OB10, the company could be valued at north of $350 million.
This would bring a smile to shareholders’ faces.
There are a few considerations however that could take the edges off those smiles.
- Firstly, Ariba has wider functionality than OB10, handling 17 purchase to pay transactions.
- Secondly, Ariba has a SaaS solution which seemed to really prick SAP’s interest.
- Thirdly, Ariba has around 800,000 companies connected to its network. OB10 has around 120,000.
So although shareholders might take serious encouragement from this M&A development, the excitement drops a little when you compare the size and functionality-reach of the two solutions.
This aside though, one question keeps coming back. What is Oracle doing in this space?
With Crossgate and Ariba in the SAP tool bag, Oracle’s equivalent offering in the purchase to pay space is seemingly looking a little meagre.
It’s been confirmed that Ariba will be sold to Oracle accounts and not exclusively SAP accounts. So what is Oracle doing to have its share of the purchase to pay market?
One question I have been asking myself all last week and heard it from a thought leader in this space at the weekend, it “when will Oracle buy OB10?”.
Whoever Oracle buys, be it Tradeshift or OB10, one thing is clear: Oracle shouldn’t be late to this party. A slow start here could put Oracle on the back foot in what is becoming a huge and lucrative market.
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How keeping it simple can help to convert 5.5 million invoices to electronic
Posted on: April 10, 2012
All government agencies in Norway, as of 1st January 2012, need to accept e-invoicing. They should demand e-invoicing and with a standard format. The public sector have now adopted the PEPPOL infrastructure in Norway. This infrastructure is open for the private sector but mandating is only for public sector. This will save the Norwegian Government around 40 million Euros. 5.5 million incoming invoices per year will be converted to 100% electronic by 2016.
I spoke with Olav Astad Kristiansen, Senior Advisor and e-Invoicing Project Manager at DIFI, the agency responsible for rolling out the Norwegian Government’s e-invoicing program. How are they going to do it? Olav says it all depends on making the infrastructure easy to set up. He wants to convince the private sector about how easy it is to set up the PEPPOL infrastructure.
This simple set up concept also applies for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). If you are going to do e-invoicing, this doesn’t necessarily need to be a big ICT project. In Norway, there are 500,000 businesses – 280,000 are SMEs. By making the ERP solutions ready to import and export the standard format, this makes a big difference. SMEs need to use simple web e-invoicing portals.
Olav will elaborate on how the private sector can learn a thing or two about this experience in using the PEPPOL infrastructure for e-invoicing in his presentation ‘What can the private sector learn from the Norwegian Government’s drive to 100% e-invoicing by 2016?’ at the e-Invoicing Europe conference, taking place on 3rd – 5th July in Brussels this year.
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During my research for developing our e-Invoicing Europe conference agenda, I thought about what has developed in this market since last year’s conference. I asked myself “How has the industry changed and what direction was it heading?” Here are a few things that sprung to mind:
A stronger link between payments and e-invoicing
Banks are now realising the potential to provide e-invoicing to their existing clients who use their payment services. They have also started to partner with e-invoicing providers to bridge the gap in functionality that make the invoice-to-pay process far more automated. In addition to this, with maturing e-invoicing practitioners, there is increased demand for additional savings from complementary functionalities to e-invoicing, such as supplier portals and dynamic discounting.
Interoperability
Around the time of our 2011 conference, a group of e-invoicing service providers formed the European e-Invoicing Service Providers’ Association (EESPA) for three main reasons:
- To promote interoperability
- To advocate and support the wide adoption of e-invoicing and its benefits
- To represent the industry, engaging in the public policy debate and recommending best practice within appropriate European forums
The fact that a Working Group for Interoperability within EESPA has recently been set up means there is now a drive to take interoperability seriously. Charles Bryant, Vice Chair of EESPA will be giving a fuller update in July at this year’s conference and also chairing a live debate with operators on interoperability for practitioners.
Public sector mandating e-invoicing
More and more national governments are mandating e-invoicing due to austerity measures, where back-office spend will be significantly reduced. Another reason is to promote growth via paying suppliers early or offering early payment or dynamic discounting, increasing liquidity into a country’s supply base. According to a 2011 Billentis report, the public sector is responsible for 15-18% of all purchases in a country. 45-65% of all companies are suppliers for the public sector and send invoices to its administration. And 100% of enterprises and households receive invoices from the public sector.
Several European governments has recently mandated e-invoicing, including Norway, Denmark, Spain and most recently Greece. The BRICs countries have slightly different motivations for e-invoicing mandates. Brazil have done so to stop tax fraud and evasion. Russia has finally made electronic invoicing legal. China’s Golden Tax Project progressed their e-invoicing journey, but the big nation likely to mandate will be India.
To gain insight into how Norway has mandated e-invoicing this year, read my next blog ‘How keeping it simple can help to convert 5.5 million invoices to electronic’.
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Culture. What does this mean? For me, it’s the attitude of the company. Ideally your company is abundant in can-do, problem-solving people, who relish the challenge of getting their teeth into a problem and aren’t afraid of hard work . But what if it’s not?
Last month sharedserviceslink.com ran The AP Tech Summit. There were some comments made by two speakers which didn’t quite sit right with me.
A large retailer which has enjoyed serious growth since the mid 1990s talked about how they have been rolling out workflow. They were rolling out the workflow to some sountries but not to others. Not because of these countries had low volume of invoices and should therefore be out of scope, but because ‘these countries liked the paper’.
The second speaker represented a defence manufacturing company. Theirs was a tale of e-invoicing, which was pleasing to the ear until the speaker refered to ‘top secret’ supplier invoices. According to the speaker, stakeholders in the project wished to keep these ‘top secret’ invoices as paper because there was a belief that ‘paper is more secure’.
In both these examples I was taken aback. Firstly, of course countries like paper more than electronic because it’s a known. The art of being a successful project leader is to sell the dream of what workflow and e-invoicing gives you. And for the business to realise that to step into this dream they must reliquish the known – the past.
Secondly, who really believes that paper invoicing is more secure that e-invoicing? Is post more secure than an electronic scheduled download? No.
So my question to the audience at The AP Tech Summit was, “are you really going to let the culture of your company be greater than your dreams to improve it?” There are always objections and show stoppers. But if they’re not reasonable, the question to ask is: “am I really going to allow this nonsensical reason stop me in my endeavours?”
So to answer the question – when should a ‘can’t do’ culture be greater than your dreams? I think we can all respond in unison:”Never!”
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Sibos is one of the biggest events in the financial services’ calendar and we’ve just announced that this year it will welcome Susie West to its panel debate on e-invoicing in Toronto.
The session will explore the evolving landscape for electronic invoicing, in particular how collaboration between banks, solution providers and corporates is crucial to the development of the market.
The number of electronic invoices being transmitted around the world is still low, but there are high expectations for growth. As we know, e-invoicing not only makes organisations more efficient but it also streamlines trade between countries.
Listening to our delegates and sponsors, it’s clear that the obstacles to faster growth include misplaced perceptions, slow take up from the banking sector and regulatory challenges.
In addition to contributing her insight at Sibos, Susie will be moderating the discussion between Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bottomline Technologies, the State Treasury of Finland and Fundtech FSC on 20th September.
We think this is an important debate to have and we’re excited to be participating.
Let us know if you’re planning on attending too.
Learn more about this session and Sibos as a whole.
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e-Invoicing Europe: one year on
Posted on: July 5, 2011
- In: Conference | e-Invoicing | Electronic invoicing | P2P | Procurement | Technology | Working Capital
- 1 Comment
Goodness! What a morning at e-Invoicing Europe 2011 in London.
In four hours we’ve covered ten success factors for e-invoicing; explored the future e-invoicing landscape from the perspectives of the European Union, government policies, and public and private-sector adoption; and had practitioner insight from Orange Business Services, easyJet, Kimberly Clark, Finncontainers and BBC.
This is the third year for our e-invoicing conference and it’s hugely satisfying to see how our delegates and their projects have developed, and how the discussions we’re having have matured.
The easyJet story is a prime example. At our event last year in Paris (which really was sizzling in 34-degree heat), Imtiaz Ahmed, Finance Systems Project Manager, participated as a delegate. He did a short interview with us to explain why he was there and how he was at the beginning of the easyJet e-invoicing journey.
Today, with his colleague Sarah Rutt, Finance Service Centre Manager, Imtiaz gave us an update on their progress. As all the speakers have said, before jumping into e-invoicing get your house in order. EasyJet identified the sticking points in its P2P process, understood what could be addressed by reviewing internal processes, and pinpointed which manual processes could be automated.
With the foundations in place they have been able to start considering in detail what e-invoicing will look like for the airline company in terms of technology, change management, invoice receipts, reporting, workflow and implementation.
To reach their goals of reduced time and cost of processing, improved working capital management, and greater billing accuracy, Sarah says that it is unlikely that there will be one solution that will work for all their suppliers.
And echoing another recurring theme of the morning, easyJet’s procurement team is set to play a significant role. The e-invoicing project is fortunate that a recent restructure means that finance and procurement both report to the CFO now, which will enable this crucial alignment.
This snippet from easyJet gives a flavour of how the market is evolving as companies continue to make the compelling business case and start to deliver real results. And it shows that a lot can happen in 12 short months.
If you couldn’t join us, you can follow the nuggets via twitter and our tag for this event #einv11.
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It may be cold in London and a tad chilly in the conference room at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, but the topics under discussion are already heating up on the first morning of our Accounts Payable Automation Summit.
Running through the results of the pre-conference survey our members participated in, KPIs proved an interesting area. The top three weren’t surprising: processing time, payment on time and first-time match rates are all highly scrutinised.
Some of the less-common measures provoked some thought, such as the percentage discount taken. Only a handful of respondents said they monitor it, however, with the rise in automation and e-invoicing, early payment or dynamic discounts can offer huge savings so expect it to feature higher up the list this time next year.
VAT accuracy and compliance are a growth area for KPIs. Governments draw huge revenues from this tax and as most countries are tightening their fiscal belts they are also being less lenient about late payment or lack of compliance.
Members at our conference represent a pretty good snapshot of the market as a whole where most companies are not yet fully automated or running touchless payment processes. To take advantage of the real benefits from automation, understanding where you are today and knowing what to measure is key.
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