Insights

It's been a difficult couple of weeks to RIM. The service disruption in parts of Europe then more recently in the US couldn't have come at a worse time. With revenues down 10% and profits more than halved,  (according to The Economist) it's a brave IT buyer that backs the Blackberry. The Blackberry is losing ground for all kinds of reasons. Some blame the odd governance structure of Research in Motion with joint chairmen also acting as joint CEO and the growing competition from the iPhone and Android smart phones is having a significant impact. But RIM's difficulties are just a single example of how the rapidly moving market for consumer IT is making the job of managing IT policy and IT sourcing more complex.

We're delighted to welcome Simon Shorthose, MD Readsoft UK,  as a guest contributor If you had to choose one overarching theme that sums up business in recent years it would be the focus on cost reduction. And rightly so, cutting the flab and improving the bottom line, makes sound business sense, and there are many tools in the market that have helped organisations become leaner and more cost effective. The problem is that whilst achieving cost reduction is a valuable activity in the short term, it invariably fails to quantify original costs or provide the capability to conduct on-going monitoring of processes or give a route to future growth. This is why operational feedback on how a business is performing is so important if a company is to keep ‘on track’ and become smarter, more agile and better aligned with strategies that drive improved business practice, customer relationships and profit.

Tradeshift are an enigma. Their revenue model may have you perplexed. Their tagline "Shift Happens" might raise an eyebrow and their animation for the launch of their Instant Payment offering - well is isn't exactly Pixar. But don't let it fool you. Behind the enigmatic facade of Tradeshift is a brave business model - a business model that is going to fundamentally change the rules of supply chain finance. And this week, I spoke to Tradeshift's charismatic CEO, Christian Lanng, who, in his own words, began to "reveal the riddle that is Tradeshift"

E-invoicing isn't the first victim of standards and it won't be the last. B2B standards, designed to guide businesses down the right path, to allow disparate organizations to inter-operate, don't work. They have the opposite effect. They are self defeating. They attempt to create a single agreed way of working but instead, they embed incompatibility and constrain growth and until we get rid of the standards we'll continue to flounder.

Recently we wrote about how the introduction of e-invoicing could allow fraud to be automated alongside AP processes. The previous article is here. And in case anyone was in any doubt about how prevalent fraud can be, we thought it would be interesting to provide a little insight from the purchase to pay coal face on how easy it can be.

We hear all the time about big companies paying suppliers late, abusing their power to take advantage of the good will of smaller companies by delaying payment for as long as possible in order to enrich themselves at the expense of weaker, more vulnerable companies. Well, it’s not true. Deliberate late payment by large companies in all but a few exceptional cases doesn't go on. Systematic management of cash flow by withholding payments is a myth. The reality is, surprisingly, much worse!