Author: Ian Burdon

17 Dec

Posted at 17:13h in e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing by
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Recently I had the pleasure of being with both Pete Loughlin and Peter Smith of Spend Matters Europe at an eInvoicing roundtable event in London on 9 December. The event was both enjoyable and frustrating. Before I share some reflections on the event and to avoid any doubt, I say immediately that I support the use of eInvoices - but I am also sceptical about the way in which the debate is being framed. One of the oft-repeated assertions during the roundtable was that the business case for e-invoicing as an activity in its own right is “overwhelming”. One commenter from the floor said at least twice that the government is “sitting on” several £billion in benefits which, I presume we were to infer, would be available if only the UK Government would adopt eInvoicing. I do not believe this to be the case, at least in the terms it was presented.

25 Nov

Posted at 19:32h in AP Automation, e-invoicing, Electronic Invoicing, EU Commission by
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A couple of articles ago I mentioned the EU’s draft Directive on eInvoicing. It is a sensible document. However it has some problems which raise important questions. The core problem is that the reasoning in the Explanatory Memorandum to the draft is flawed. This is not just grumpy pedantry but something fundamental.

07 Nov

Posted at 13:58h in Global Sourcing, P2P Europe, Procurement Process, Public Sector Procurement by
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On 8 October 2013 the Aswad Composite Mills factory, in Gazipur, outside Dhaka in Bangladesh burnt down. Seven workers were killed and a further fifty were injured in the fire. As newspaper reports state, the fire came soon after eleven hundred workers had been killed in a blaze at the Rana Plaza factory, a tragedy which led to more than ninety High Street retailers reaching an accord to ensure fire and safety inspections at their suppliers’ premises. The Aswad Composite Mills were not amongst those to be inspected because they were not perceived to be in the direct supply chain of the Western retailers.

I thought of these tragedies when reading the draft Directive on public procurement regarding use of “life cycle costs” in assessment procedures. I am aware of the possibility of bathos in that sentence – I was reflecting on the very real human cost of supply chain decisions the further one looks back through the tiers.

31 Oct

Posted at 05:27h in P2P Europe, Procurement Best Practices, Public Sector Procurement by
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I have been reading the draft of the new Procurement Directive. I had previously dipped into it but have now read all 360-odd pages in sequence. There is a lot in the draft Directive of value, particularly about sustainability, but I found myself musing on the concept of “Abnormally Low Tenders”. The explanatory notes in the draft are quite clear what the concern is: “(44a) Tenders that appear abnormally low in relation to the works, supplies or services might be based on technically, economically or legally unsound assumptions or practices. Where the tenderer cannot provide a sufficient explanation, the contracting authority should be entitled to reject the tender. Rejection should be mandatory in cases where the contracting authority has established that the abnormally low price or costs proposed results from non-compliance with mandatory Union legislation or national law compatible with it in the fields of social, labour or environmental law or international labour law provisions”.

11 Oct

Posted at 08:00h in Procurement Process, Public Sector Procurement by
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A couple of months ago I was looking at a pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) issued by a London Borough. It contained something that I had not seen before – a mandatory requirement for two references to be sent directly to the authority, by the referees, as part of the PQQ  submission. Failure to persuade a customer to do this meant automatic exclusion for the potential supplier from any further participation. I assumed that the buyer had experienced a brainstorm but then it happened again with a different local authority from a different part of the country.

09 Oct

Posted at 09:09h in AP Automation, e-invoicing, e-Procurement, Electronic Invoicing, EU Commission, P2P Europe by
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In October 2008, some colleagues and I were in Brussels for a European Commission/PEPPOL session. Halfway through the morning we called our office travel agents and asked if they could book us onto earlier flights home and left. During the morning session I wrote in my diary “trying to decide between slitting my wrists or hurling myself from the window. One of the most dispiriting experiences of my life is sitting here listening to policy officers and IT staff talking rubbish and reinventing the wheel. Do our taxes pay for this nonsense? Yes they do”. Two things reminded me of this recently: the first was reading a PEPPOL Business Interoperability Specification (BIS 28A  – Ordering) which was out for review; the second was the reaction when the Draft Directive on eInvoicing managed to omit any mention of PEPPOL.

12 Mar

Posted at 16:21h in Cloud Computing by
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There remains a lot of gobbledygook talked and written about “Cloud” computing, as anyone who has been around the industry for any time is very well aware.  For the most part it is a species of marketing for a particular consumption model which does not pay enough (or sometimes any) attention to underlying business need. Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman made well known assaults on “Cloud” when the term first began to gain currency around 2008. Other veterans I met referred to it as IBM Bureau Computing reborn, Network Computing for the broadband age or, my favourite, from a gleeful representative of a well-known multinational, “outsourcing without service level agreements”. The early criticisms were valid in the context they were made and might have remained valid had something not changed. But something has changed, very rapidly.