Editor’s note | The following article was submitted to us by Abe WalkingBear, and can be viewed in full here. It comes from our previous discussion on Buyer Initiated Payments.

Phoenix, AZ:

It happened again.

Following my delivery of an after lunch presentation titled “What Top Business Managers Don’t Know About Credit and How It Hurts Their Company” several people approached me and said that they had planned to eat and then skip out on my presentation, but they were sure glad they hadn’t.

This group of distribution and manufacturing executives were no different than many other top business managers who still equate Credit with accounting and with risk management.

They learned a different way…and went away with their thinking changed.

In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962..Thomas Kuhn defines a paradigm as an accepted set of givens which provide a model problem and a successful solution…

The word “outsourcing” is still taboo in many finance and accounting circles. For many people, outsourcing conjures up images of large scale lay-offs and your friends and neighbors out of work. Or worse still, if the outsourcing mantra takes over your company, you could be the one looking for another job. As Harry Truman said “it’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.” We would like to ensure that there is nothing for employees to worry about when an organization has outsourcing on its agenda. Though it might sound like an oxymoron, outsourcing could, in fact, be the result of a company’s growth, rather than a downsizing effort.

A company that is growing rapidly might investigate outsourcing accounts payable functions to keep up with its growing invoice volume, instead of adding additional in-house full-time employees. Or a company might want to leverage the…

Digital Vision based in Northwich, Cheshire, United Kingdom is a system integrator who specialises in accounts payable automation. Its solutions are based on Kofax’s Ascent (DICOM), a data capture product that scans invoices and other purchase-to-pay documents. Through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Ascent converts data from paper to electronic data which can then be automatically fed in to an accounts payable system. As you very well know, this is not a bullet-proof solution, nevertheless it has a place in the current market until EIPP becomes the norm. Digital Vision also offers workflow and content management solutions to extend their data capture capability.Digital Vision has about 70 customers, some being UK based blue chips such as Barclays, BAe Systems, BUPA, DSGi, Countrywide, HBoS, Abbey/Grupo Santander and many SMEs. Founders Dennis Wright, and Peter…

Just this past week, Henry Ijams and I were talking about how, despite the rapid gains in the ePayables world, financing and integration continue to be problematic. Case in point: A client mentioned that early payment discounting is very inticing, yet currently out of thier reach due to lack of liquidity to invest in paying suppliers early. Henry and I went on to conclude that, until a solution came along to offer easy access to supply chain financing in the order of magnitude of, say, a p-card solution for larger ticket purchases, many discounts would continue to be lost even as technology for capturing became evermore sophisticated.

Enter JPMorgan Chase. They walked us through their newest ePayables solution on Friday, and Henry and I were not just impressed - we were blown away that the new Xign owners have responded so quickly to this giant market opportunity.

PayStream analysts recently held a briefing with Basware to discuss the company’s AP automation solution – BasWare Invoice Automation (IA) – and understand its value proposition to clients. Basware is a Finnish company that now has operations in over 20 countries worldwide. BasWare IA applications enables its clients to automate all invoice types including purchase order (PO) or contract based invoices, recurring invoices as well we non-PO invoices that require review and approval.

Basware IA solution sets the company apart in several ways. Firstly, depending on your business needs, one can choose between using BasWare’s proprietary imaging solution – FastScan – and integrating the solution with a third party scanning application. Another differentiator for Basware’s solution is in its robust workflow tool, which offers most of its functionality out-of-the-box. BasWare prides itself on the fact that clients can “configure” the solution to meet their requirements rather than…

The 3rd ExPP Summit was held on 10th and 11th of September at Millenium Glocester Hotel in London. I attended both days as a guest of Bruno Koch of Billentis. Bruno, who organized the event with Johannes von Mulert of Vereon AG, is to be congratulated for hosting an excellent gathering of the European e-invoicing community.

In the evening of the 1st day, I had the opportunity to speak to both Bruno and Jahannes. Whilst Bruno brings e-invoicing domain expertise and industry connectivity, Johannes brings skills and resources necessary to organize such a large event. Together, they have delivered a superb conference packed with users and providers of e-invoicing solutions as well as other stakeholders such as banks, regularity and legislative authorities. Johannes was fascinated by web 2.0 activities in the UK and is attempting to…

In a recent PayStream analyst briefing with Frank Davis, Managing Director of Sales & Marketing for PurchasingNet, Frank identified the greatest challenge he’s facing in marketing the new dynamic discounting module, Early Payment Discount Management, for PNet: Poor Cash Flow. Here’s what we uncovered:

Despite the promise that dynamic early-pay discounts hold for dramatic improvements in Supply Chain Finance management , the reality is that many companies struggle to pay their suppliers on-time. Indeed, the idea of moving a payment “forward,” whether in an automated on-line environment such as PNet’s Invoice Management solution, or any AP Automation solution, is not attractive for all buyers.

In our opinion, we don’t think there will be enough demand from corporates to trigger a wide-scale shift in corporate culture until we see more banks and finance companies start to advance funds on behalf of their corporate payers, much the way they do for corporate…

Collaboration is the highest form of business. Discussion, team effort, and collaboration - This is the very definition of today’s workforce. In the spirit of that, I was so pleased tonight to read Manoj Ranweera’s two-post discussion of his collaboration with Paystream Voices. I encourage everyone to read it. After a successful Accounts Payable webinar today, and the beginning of true blogosphere team, it is hard not to be hopeful for the future.

Since my entry into EIPP space 3 years ago, I have collected a vast number of documents on EIPP and related subjects (one reason for edocr). Among these were white papers and analyst reports produced by Paystream Advisors, which I found very informative especially with respect to understanding the US market. Over the years, I have come to respect Henry Ijams and his fellow analysts over their deep understanding of the Electronic Invoice Presentment and Payment (EIPP) and Supply Chain Finance (SCF). So can you imagine how delighted I was when Mitch Baxter of Transcepta asked whether I would like a personal introduction to Henry Ijams?

My first encounter with Henry took place less than 2 months ago and it became very clear to both of us that it made sense for us to work together. Henry was …

Electronic procurement – or e-procurement as it was known during the heydays of the dotcom era, when it was fashionable to use the “e” word with everything – has experienced an interesting lifecycle. In the e-procurement space, organizations have seen everything from hype to horror and now acceptance and even growth. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, owing to the maturation of Internet technologies and the astronomical growth of the Web to conduct business, almost every organization has “automation” on its corporate agenda, and e-procurement appeared to be a good place to start.

A plethora of procurement automation solutions cropped up in the marketplace and organizations were rushing to implement these in the hope of achieving tremendous cost savings, enhanced spend managed capabilities and improved supplier relations. Unfortunately, not every adopter of e-procurement saw the anticipated benefits materialize. The biggest stumbling block faced by these early adopters was their inability…