Electronic Invoicing

This is the fourth in the series The World Map of e-invoicing focusing on Asia Pacific. With many aspects of the economies and cultures in Asia and the far East, it is a mistake to make direct comparisons with the West. While the eastern economies have very skillfully learned to adapt to do business with the West in a western way, the fundamental cultural differences remain and the way eastern businesses deal with each other can be difficult to fathom through western eyes. Indeed, expert analysts observe that as the balance of power tips toward the eastern economies, it is increasingly apparent that the East knows much more about the West than the West knows about the East.

The global economic crisis is bad enough and forcing business to work with their hands tied behind their backs isn’t helping. The failure of the dominant western economies, the US and Europe in particular, to encourage better business processes is testament to their lack of vision, their ignorance and their weakness. While their economies are crumbling, their governments’ paranoid insistence in archaic and bureaucratic  record keeping is allowing competing economies to take leaps ahead.

If you had a crystal ball for your business, would you use it? Of course you would. And what if it said that within the next decade, you’d be filing for chapter 11 protection and putting your patents – the core assets of your business – up for sale in an attempt to salvage something? You don’t need a crystal ball to see that the expected growth in electronic invoicing is going to send a few businesses - big names, healthy and substantial businesses – down exactly this route. Businesses who grew to support their customers in a paper world – a world that is disappearing rapidly – simply won’t survive the decade unless they make major adaptations to the way they work.