Insights

28 Oct

Posted at 13:00h in Procurement Best Practices, Procurement Process, Purchase to Pay, Purchase to Pay Process by
1 Like
It’s astonishing! At a time when we have Sarbanes Oxley and a culture of control, in the climate of transparency and scrutiny and a fetishistic focus on finance – how is it that fraudsters have been able to get away with a more than 50% increase in procurement related theft? But it’s not that astonishing really. A cursory glance at the procurement practices and purchase to pay processes in any organization will reveal opportunities to defraud and while we should never forget that it is the fraudster that’s to blame, the responsibility is shared with the executives who choose to turn a blind eye and underinvest in proper P2P.

22 Oct

Posted at 14:10h in Financial Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Finance, Working Capital Management by
1 Like
A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Tony Duggan, CEO of Crossflow Payments, an organisation looking at alternative ways to bring together suppliers and corporate buyers and strengthen supply chains. Supply Chain Finance is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. The old guard, the banks who seem to have tunnel vision for the very big trade finance deals, and the factors who exploit to a greater or lesser extent the vulnerabilities of small and medium sized businesses view the new SCF players with a mixture of  doubt, suspicion and (although they’d not admit it) – fear. And they’re right to. Some of the new models emerging are innovative and impressive and they promise to take business away from the traditionalists. Crossflow is going to do just that in my view. Inspired by hands on experience in industry, Crossflow Payments has taken the concept of ‘Just In Time’ manufacturing and applied it to the financial supply chain. Tony believes that this can help transform the way financial supply chains operate.

21 Oct

Posted at 03:20h in AP Automation, Purchasing Card by
0 Likes
The amount of sensitive data on the servers of mid-to-large enterprises can be quite shocking. Included in the data could be credit card numbers. Locally storing your customer’s credit card data can be a risky proposition as your company could fall victim to a costly data breach. Many large enterprises keep multiple copies of their customers’ payment data on old legacy systems whose underlying technologies remain solidly rooted in the 1960s.  Because these systems are transaction-based rather than customer-based, their interoperability with internal audit and accounting processes is severely limited.  To make matters worse, organizations often don’t know where sensitive data resides on those systems and have no control over it.

13 Oct

Posted at 13:10h in AP Automation, The Rest, Working Capital Management by
1 Like
The BBC reports today the the Prompt Payment Code - a UK government backed initiative to encourage big business to pay on time - isn't working. In other news, the sun came up this morning and it is expected to get dark sometime tonight. The Prompt Payment Code provides little more than gentle encouragement to business to demonstrate - in words at least - that they will pay according to terms. I wouldn't criticize for one moment those businesses that have signed up to it. I know that they are sincere in their intentions. But the code doesn't have teeth. It doesn't name and shame transgressors. It doesn't hold business to account if they pay little attention to actually delivering against the promise. And it's hardly surprising therefore that it's not working.

11 Oct

Posted at 08:00h in Procurement Process, Public Sector Procurement by
0 Likes
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
1 Like
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.

08 Oct

Posted at 09:25h in Financial Supply Chain Management, Supply Chain Finance by
1 Like
Crossflow Payments has made two senior appointments in as many weeks. They have just announced that Jack Perschke has joined the company as Commercial Director. Jack brings significant experience of complex commercial-led change from both his past roles with Ernst and Young's advisory practice and his own commercial strategy business.  He also has extensive government and IT experience having worked with The Cabinet Office, The Ministry of Justice, Passport UK, The Government Procurement Service and The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS).