Insights

Last week, I had the great please of speaking to Markus Hornburg, Vice President Product Development & Compliance at OB10, a real expert on e-invoicing compliance, about his views on e-invoicing compliance. I can claim some expertise on e-invoicing but it’s quite humbling when you chat to someone with really deep global expertise on a particular subject. And Markus can claim just that. His experience goes back to the late 1990s when in Switzerland, he played a part in establishing the first electronic invoicing legislation in the world. He's been with OB10 for over 5 years now. I’ve always viewed compliance as being one of OB10’s strength. It was one of the central pillars of the OB10 proposition when they were first founded and so I was interested to hear Markus’ views on the approach that the plethora of newer players take to compliance, on the European Union post 2013 and on the challenges of using e-invoicing globally.

This week I had the privilege to see a demonstration of a technology that is going to fundamentally change accounts payable. Kofax announced the acquisition of Mobiflex in December last year. They announced at the time that this would bring Kofax Capture to remote workers allowing truck drivers, field engineers, architects and insurance claims assessors to capture data from documents in the field. We wrote about it here and I have to confess I was skeptical. But, after seeing the demo, skeptic no more. From an AP automation perspective, Kofax Mobile Capture is even better than even Kofax know. And here’s why.

This is 2012 and still my bank appears not to know who I am. This is despite the fact I have credit cards, insurance, checking accounts and mortgages with them.  Shouldn’t their customer relationship management systems be able to identify me? Maybe they do have a clever CRM system and maybe I’ve just been segmented into the “who the f*** is this guy” category. It’s one of the great disappointments of the 21st century that the local pizza place knows me better than my bank.

It's ironic. The very statistics that show the compelling case for AP automation also show that AP automation is the last thing a business needs to be planning. Today at Kofax Transform 2012, Scott Pezza from Aberdeen (@scottpezza) presented a comprehensive set of numbers illustrating the compelling case for automation of Accounts Payable. One metric after another showed that best in class organizations stand head and shoulders above even average businesses in terms of benefits they derive from initiatives like e-invoicing and scan and capture. But as I listened to Scott's eloquent presentation, something nagged at me.

I was excited to read about Alusta last week – the end-to-end framework or platform that Basware have developed for their procure to pay offerings and I was keen to understand a bit more about it when I hooked up with Juha Häkämies VP Market Development, Rowan Lemley, product Marketing Manager and John Webster, VP Global Product Marketing What is Alusta exactly? Is it the purchase to pay panacea or simply vaporware – a new marketing spin on an old set of products?  Actually a bit of both – but in a good way.