Today, we at Basware are announcing our research, The Cost of Control study in which we, in conjunction with leading academics in this space, reveal how well businesses across the globe are utilising their finance and procurement departments to navigate unprecedented economic times. Supply chains form the backbone of many businesses today, and many of the high profile business failures in recent months can be, at least in part, attributed to financial fractures within the supply chain. An unrelenting focus on cost cutting and uneasy relationships between finance and procurement professionals further combine to create an environment where supply chain risks, if left unchecked can threaten company stability.

This survey, commissioned by Basware in association with IESE Business School (Europe) and the Kelley School of Business (USA), explores how the relationship between finance and procurement functions is symptomatic of wider operational strengths and weaknesses and evaluates how the management of financial and procurement processes affects wider business performance.

The key findings of the Cost of Control survey, based on the views of 550 financial directors and CFOs from large enterprises around the world, can be summarised as follows:

Despite a high-risk economic climate, CFOs in organisations struggle to recognise the importance of closely managing supply chains through procurement

• Only 28% of respondents believe that procurement has a significant impact on financial risk exposure
• Risk analysis (39%), margins growth (39%) and other strategic goals are all sacrificed in place of bottom line cost reduction (64%) as a strategic priority

Finance underestimates the strategic value of purchasing and the supply chain to business performance

• 52% of financial decision makers consider purchasing is becoming a more strategic function, although 36% believe it is still largely administrative
• Only 27% of respondents describe procurement as a function that has a positive impact on enterprise growth

Businesses are experiencing efficiency gaps in data capture, automation and integration across purchasing and finance functions

• On average, only 42% of indirect spending is captured
• Only 50% of the processes supporting purchasing are automated
• Under half (46%) of CFOs consider that purchasing and finance functions are integrated effectively

Satisfaction with cost saving strategy is influenced by levels of process automation within businesses

• Businesses with highly automated* purchasing processes are more likely to consider that purchasing and finance have maximised savings in the past 12 months (68%) than those with lower levels of process automation [58%]
• Satisfaction of ‘delivering on cost saving targets’ increases from 37% in low automation businesses to 55% wit high automation businesses

*High automation – Businesses that stated the percentage of purchasing processes that are automated is above 50%. Low automation – Business that stated the percentage of purchasing processes that are automated is below 40%

Levels of data capture, automation and integration show room for improvement

We will be posting further updates on this research here on the blog, so please check back for more details. Alternatively, if you would like the full report, please download the report at www.basware.com/control.

Esa Tihilä Uncategorized

A friend of mine has been in training for his first full marathon this June. I am witness to his fitness regime, with long and short runs, motivational work outs, and making sure there is the requisite downtime between each training session. Even before starting this, he went to school – a running school where they gave instruction on how to actually run the full 42km (26.3 miles) distance.

It struck me that many corporate processes we see suffer from “over-training”- they do too much running without taking those necessary breaks to gain clarity and focus, and improve and change their current working practices. Looking at the general acceptance of spend analysis software, many corporations are still running projects started many moons ago. Bad habits may have crept in and their manual sourcing processes are starting to feel a bit tired. At the same time, they could be lacking the imagination to look for alternative methods. Or even worse, in the hurry for immediate cost savings, some corporations have overlooked the need to stop and assess what can be improved not only now, but further down the line- that is getting rid of the burden on manual sourcing and moving towards a new automated and continuous process.

According to a January 14, 2009 report published by Forrester Research (Best Practices: Successfully Planning For and Managing Automated Spend Analysis Projects) “fewer than 700 companies globally have implemented spend analysis software”. I feel this to be a really low number, especially in these times when budgets are being examined very closely and benefits of spend analyses data collection and improvement project are clear. Best practices collected from hundreds of our installations indicate that you could start with these activities;

• Consolidate the supplier base. Areas where quick savings can be recoginsed are in office supplies, research & development, training, marketing and travel through concentrating purchasing power.
• Negotiate contracts centrally. You do need the required negotiation skills within the procurement department so that they can successfully implement company-wide spend management practises and monitoring processes. Minimise maverick buying through business buy-in to using a central purchase management system.
• Ensure company wide transparency and visibility in purchase to pay process through automation of the processes creating a set of unified policies which are more easily enforced

The benefits in automating the sourcing processes are for example in true visibility, increased efficiency, higher matching rates and better contract matching. According to Robert Fieten of BME (REF DR Robert Fieten 2009 BME) these can bring you significant savings. His research suggests that reducing purchase costs by 3% has the same effect as increasing the corporate turnover by 52% in trade industry, or even as much as 60% in food industry! Not too many of us today can promise such revenue increases but using software to analyse operational spend can decrease the cost of purchasing so companies can still benefit.

So like preparing for the marathon, you should look at improving processes over a period of time, and think about incremental steps that improve and don’t break you! Shifting to an automated process from a manual one can provoke conflicting interests among those involved, much like the internal wranglings endured by those training for big runs so be prepared and get, just like my friend did, the best advice before you start. It will save you pain over the longer term and understanding how it works from those in the know will lessen the pain and move you more quickly towards the finish line!

Juha Häkämies Procurement

A few days ago I visited one of the Fortune 500 companies where the financial and procurement directors were deciding how to best respond to their CFO’s demand for immediate improvements to both the procurement and account payable organizations:

“How can I get corporate procurement and finance operations to provide accurate, efficient, visible and auditable information on the overall process from purchases to payment – and at the same time save costs?”

As we have written on our blog, more and more industry seminars and analysts like Forrester, Gartner and AMR have started to focus on the benefits to be realized when these two departments work together and offer insight into the other’s work. And our experience at recent events also points to this growing trend. Many companies like Heineken, Gannett and Finnair are using the enterprise purchase to pay approach to achieve even greater visibility into their own operations, innovating their own processes in order to improve spend management and the current requirement for practically all organizations today, to reduce costs. Here are a couple of examples of what the EPP approach has meant for our clients.

- on average a corporation is handling ~15,000 annual invoices/FTE
- with electronic financial process this can be increased to ~18,000- 20,000 invoices/FTE
- with introduction of 5-way matching and integrated supplier activation services >90% invoice automation level can be reached – increasing the amount of invoices to ~38 000 invoices/FTE

Making the change like these companies is easier than you suppose with our blueprints for different styles and types of organization.

Juha Häkämies Market trends

Consistent with the theme of Basware getting out to events, we attended the Shared services and outsourcing week in Budapest. There was much discussion about ways to derive the most benefit from automation. One of the discussed concerns was the time to value for deploying ERP solutions and, especially in today’s market, getting a swift return on IT investment, as well as working with new, more efficient processes.

It’s all about ensuring the best workflows are built from a people, process and tool perspective, and as shared by Tom Bangemann of The Hackett Group, the drive to be a world class, efficient enterprise focuses on two areas: operational excellence and complexity reduction. We agree! Introducing automation to the finance processes helps in both of areas, simplifying processes as well as improving efficiencies manyfold. Another issue Tom highlighted, fitting in well with the momentum Basware is seeing, is the trend in shared services outsourcing towards automation. The Hackett Group’s research* shows that 80% of organisations are continuing automation initiatives – and that they envisage in five years time, 91% of companies will have higher degrees of automation or self-service capabilities.

But how does this journey tie into the current concerns regarding time consuming and expensive ERP deployments? There are areas around the full scale ERP installation which can be quickly installed and adapted into people’s workflow, as well as providing that all important quick time to value, such as einvoicing solutions. As Basware provides a number of different ways to get companies started, or to move them along this journey, while they deploy or manage an ERP system, our discussions with people going through this phase were very positive!

*Source: SSON & The Hackett Group, 2009 SSO survey in G&A

Juha Häkämies Market trends

Let’s not make a bugaboo out of VAT accounting when it comes to e-invoicing. When googling the whole thing looks quite daunting and the stilted language of the EU Directive on the “common system of value added tax” does its fair share to obfuscate the situation. (See: http://eur-lex.europa.eu)

Add then your own country’s national legislation and your business with suppliers or customers located in other EU countries or further afield, you can happily drive your boss to despair with a request for funds to get legal advice on waterproofing your VAT accounting process.

Safeguard your career and focus on three things:
1. Check your existing invoices and find out if anybody is significantly breaching the guidelines with respect to the invoice content needed for using them as an input into your VAT accounting process. (See: http://ec.europa.eu )

2. Find out what the business practices are in your country, we still see a huge difference in what the EU Directives proscribe, what the specific national legislation mandates and what businesses do in practice.

If you find yourself in a country where the use of digital signatures in e-invoicing is an established procedure, then – when switching to e-invoicing – ask for digitally signed e-invoices and order a signature verification service for those e-invoices that you receive and that are digitally signed.

When you send e-invoices: Your e-invoicing operator will digitally sign them – on your behalf.

When you receive e-invoices: Your e-invoicing operator will produce a verification report, which in combination with the e-invoice itself will form the basic data for VAT accounting.

3. Store both the e-invoice and the verification report with your other electronic documents in an electronic archive that meets the requirement of your country of residence. In Germany, for example, you could enjoy hours of researching guidelines grouped under such scary acronyms as GoBS, FAIT and GDPdU. (See: http://www.idw.de)

Once you have e-invoicing in place, you can really go to town and cover any of those holes that your e-business-savvy tax authority may require you to cover such as:

Of course one way to circumvent all this bureaucratic nitpicking is to start conducting your business on the ‘Italian waters of the Lake Lugano’ where the EU VAT directive does not apply.

Juha Häkämies Uncategorized

We recently attended ProcureCon Indirect 2009 – it was a great place to meet those running procurement divisions in a variety of industries, all coming together to share best practices. And also to get some of the must-have peer assurance, which is even more necessary with the pressure on procurement departments in these economic times.

But for all the skewed perceptions of other business units seeing procurement as “cost cutters”, and squeezing savings out in the short term, there were some great themes and highlights around the strategic value of procurement, as it reflects, responds and works with business needs.

Holistic risk management, looking at protecting the supply base, has never been more critical to a company, and there was a great presentation by Johnson and Johnson highlighting their strategy in this area. In addition, our own CFO, Mika Harjuaho added to another discussion area, presenting on how procurement and finance, working closely together, can help the company achieve its targets and more. Interestingly enough, both functions have common goals even if you do not come to think of it in daily operations. However, for some procurement professionals, they raised concerns regarding a lack of confidence in speaking the finance language or being at ease working to its remit. This shows that internal training to raise financial awareness within the procurement function could provide some great payback for the company.

Together, finance and procurement can drive better working capital management as well as obtaining greater spend visibility for purchase cost savings, both in the identification and implementation phases. But as part of a broader change agenda and with the appropriate automation tools in place, this collaboration can really bring huge benefits. Developing metrics to provide the business with better, more real time intelligence as well as improving business engagement with external stakeholders, which creates a more agile, responsive organisation, one far more likely to thrive in the downturn.

Basware presented at the 4th annual ProcureCon Indirect event in Amsterdam.

Juha Häkämies Differentiation, Market trends

As related in the previous post, it seems 2009 is the year for many companies to make most of the Purchase to Pay (P2P) solutions and to take advantage of the benefits of high level of automation. A recent study carried out by sharedserviceslink.com shows that almost 89% of P2P professionals look to be live with their e-invoicing program before December 2010. But still, many are concerned about the implications and potential risks posed by this journey. The two areas highlighted by this study are definitely worth exploring in more detail, and I will take the supplier activation first – my future post will look at VAT regulations and changes in relation to e-invoicing.

Supplier activation
One of the biggest worries for recipients entering into einvoicing is activating their suppliers to send electronic invoices. The benefits for the receiver are clear – with savings of around 70-80% in handling costs directly available starting from the first invoice. The supplier benefits are still sometimes doubted, but the recent study by Billentis* shows these doubts are unfounded– with 57% savings/invoice for a supplier. Getting suppliers activated to send e-invoices is fundamental to generating the huge savings and quick ROI within the electronic invoice handling process, yet with the amount of noise out there, it is sometimes hard for the realities and valid processes to pull through.

Supplier suspicions of their customer demands can be addressed by a clear and consistent communications strategy, highlighting these cost savings and other benefits. Another hurdle to pass for the recipients is in large number of suppliers. When looking at getting suppliers to send e-invoices, work will commence with a range of companies, potentially of varying sizes and spread over multiple geographies. Outsourcing the supplier activation to an operator will help receivers to contact large numbers of suppliers with a predefined and structured operational model, enabling the customer to gain full benefit of the implemented electronic invoice processing service within a predefined timetable.

A good example of a successful entry to einvoicing is a customer that received ~10 000 invoices each month, from around 700 suppliers. To streamline the invoice handling process as well as bring instant savings in financial operations the customer decided to make a swift move to einvoicing as quickly as possible, using Basware to activate suppliers. After a few months they were receiving 25% of the invoicing volume as true einvoices. Activating suppliers globally required contacting of multiple einvoicing operators and customers behind them. This clearly was a task for their einvoicing operator – not part of the customer’s core business.

Another example is a client of Basware that decided to activate suppliers in three different European countries, but due to the nature of the markets, decided to have a completely different approach to their suppliers depending on the country. In well established markets where many businesses are already applying e-invoicing, supplier activation can be targeted to a larger amount of suppliers, while in some markets a project management approach delivers the best results, ensuring the largest invoice issuers are connected first.

The key issue to customer’s success in both examples was in making the role of suppliers to einvoicing as easy as possible. Einvoicing needs to be an effortless and cost-efficient way of sending (and receiving) invoices. Suppliers should have an option available on selecting their einvoicing connection from the preferred einvoicing operator – not just the one selected by the receiver client. This is like in the mobile networks where you expect your mobile operator to enable calls to also other mobile networks both locally and internationally. Thus Basware strongly believes in providing the suppliers with the following options for stepping into einvoicing

• suppliers to go into einvoicing through their local einvoicing partner whose operator network is then connected to receiver network
• using the Basware provided einvoicing sending tools for einvoicing sending OR
• sending the einvoices out through a buyer provided supplier portal solution

For Basware today around 30% of invoices are coming through the interoperability network and ~30% coming from its own suppliers and the rest ~40% coming from the partners like scanning houses.

For a receiver it is simple enough- it is essential to get the suppliers activated – rather like that well known song “go together like a horse and carriage!”

*“Einvoicing and ebilling in Europe” by Bruno Koch of Billentis, February10 2009. Please contact Basware if you would like further information regarding this study.

Juha Häkämies Uncategorized, eBusiness

It is a coincidence – which could also indicate a certain market momentum – that we have decided to announce the launch of Basware Connectivity services in the same week that Gartner publishes their report, Use Supplier E-Invoicing to Help Optimize Operating Cost.* This analyst firm reports, “electronic submission of supplier invoices can reduce per-invoice processing costs by as much as 70% to 90%.” We believe this really drives home the benefits of moving to an e-invoicing solution!

As many tough decisions are being made in today’s economic climate, with finance departments working hard to squeeze costs where possible, this investment can be seen for organizations processing large numbers of invoices, as a no brainer, with low initial investment costs and SaaS options on the market to manage technical risk.

But how can businesses implementing e-invoicing activate their suppliers to generate these savings? This is a challenge, which we believe was highlighted by both Gartner (in the aforementioned report) and separately by Forrester in Duncan Jones’ Best Practices: Invoice-To-Pay Process Automation, and although less pervasive than a few years ago due to natural market dynamics, there are still some best practices to consider.

Having a clear communications strategy for suppliers is paramount. Suppliers are often initially suspicious, but with benefits, such as better visibility and more timely payments, as well as an improved communication environment, these initial suspicions can be overcome. Suppliers at different stages of automation maturity also need to be provided with different options to help them progress along the route to a fully automated process, especially with the increasing awareness of those that can’t take on this process, could soon be left out in the cold in vendor selection processes. Our announcement on Basware Connectivity, acknowledging that Basware will take on the supplier activation work and drive this momentum forwards, provides a straightforward, pragmatic approach to getting suppliers onboard.

*The full report, published March 24th by Nigel Rayner, is only available to Gartner clients at www.Gartner.com.

Esa Tihilä Market trends, eBusiness eBusiness, Market trends

It seems like the discussion about how to implement the Spend Management gets more heated and thus this topic deserves an update.

As I wrote in my earlier blog entry I believe in a little (or maybe a quite) different approach than the “traditional” spend management solution providers, namely I believe in the early integration – the most traditional providers either focus on “planned spend” by utilizing PO-based estimation while the other group of vendors believes in “late integration” to existing data from multiple sources. In my opinion, the “early integration and rapid analysis” model has proved to work pretty well and I will explain my opinion a bit further here.

One of the key differences between traditional and new thinking is that in my opinion, the approach should have early validation, enrichment, cleansing and classification of spend related data instead of building highly complex spend enrichment packages around existing solutions. I do understand that it is not that simple as it sounds as most of the Purchase-to-Pay solutions have not been designed for this from the outset, but that is exactly the reason why there is room for non-SAP Purchase-to-Pay and spend solutions. When this is a core focus of a vendor, it has (and must have) more out of the box thinking to be competitive and able to position its solution as an add-on to SAP (or other ERPs) instead of going in head-to-head competition with ERP’s. So instead of trying to “replace” ERP MDM, I feel that it is more efficient to create early stage P-MDM (Process Master Data Management) that integrates well with existing or future ERP MDM implementations. This reduces the need for external validation, enrichment and classification tools.

Using the traditional model the stake holders will miss a significant opportunity to get true visibility over processes unless companies engage in yet another additional (costly) effort to create context for their spend management.

What does the context mean? It means that in addition to seeing the actual detailed categorized spend you should be able to see root-cause analysis about how you ended up in such a situation. You need to see the decision chain starting from selection of the vendors, awarding the contracts and initiating the actual procurement activities with requisitions, PO approvals, goods received inspections, payment related activities and exceptions etc. We should always remember that PO is only the “plan” what we wanted to do, and the full process with the whole exception tree until the final payment is the “evidence” of how we acted and performed against the plan. the traditional method of spend analytics will be in a dead-end soon if it does not or is not able to offer the context because it will not be able to address new requirements for supplier spend management best practices:

• Without the full visibility, you cannot fully exploit the opportunity to innovate and improve (Source: Gartner, Business Process Improvement practices)
• Regulatory and corporate values based compliance with green and other corporate reputation building initiatives (spend with vendors of choice meeting your criterion)
• Requirements to award part of the business to minority owned business as expected by current best practices (and in some cases by legislation as well)
• Ability to balanced supplier analytics (including price, SLA, compliance and other terms like sustainability and continuous improvement of quality and performance of the operations as whole)
• Corporate values and ethics as part of corporate spend management promoting the true deployment of the plans and commitments in this area

What makes me make the bold statement that traditional ERP’s and traditional spend analytics cannot keep up with this development? Why can’t they keep up with building a true Purchase-to-Pay holistic approach? There are two main reasons:

1. Non-focus business: Current Purchase-to-Pay processes are still too much “silo driven”. Software companies are selling “silo” software for sourcing, another one for contract lifecycle management and third one for financials. Instead of that, software should integrate over the value chain and should enable companies to create a holistic Purchase-to-pay blue-print to be implemented one piece at a time over the longer time and the order of implementation should be decided by the customer based on the maturity and capabilities of the organization.

2. Non-holistic approach: As the applications are too much in silos and they have not been designed to integrate over the whole value chain including all of its processes, the holistic approach is being seen too complex to implement with traditional approach. This is quite a challenge to be solved as it would require major refactoring to existing software using the traditional model and approach.

IMHO: There will be a huge change in the whole purchase-to-pay approach over the next five years. I still recall when Basware started to introduce the holistic approach to purchase-to-pay in 2002 with an international scope a year later when many analysts and company representatives said that’s nice idea… But! Well, today most of the RFP’s from large or mature smaller enterprises include more and more holistic approach to the whole integrated purchase-to-pay value chain, and yes, in my opinion, that is the way to go!

The Next Practices of spend management are already here! – 3rd Generation e-Procurement!

Jari Tavi Differentiation, Procurement

Whether you’re the CFO, CIO or Accounts Manager, the financial, management and operational advantages of adding invoice automation to SAP certainly add up – to 95% cost and efficiency savings. Bernd Kosnar of Basware explains how.

Deploying SAP helps to put certain key business processes in the fast lane. Unfortunately, for many companies, this can leave accounts and billing processes stuck in the bus lane.

These either remain tethered to paper-based manual processes or are the victims of dead end attempts at automation. AP and order-to-cash cycles may still involve printing, mailing or faxing of invoices and other accompanying documents, driving up costs and eating into profitability.

Any stage in the accounts process that involves manual processing acts as a further drag on efficiency. So it’s no surprise that SAP users are turning their attention to extending process automation across the organisation, beyond core processes to traditionally paper-intensive areas such as procurement and invoice processing.

If critical financial data from key documents such as orders, invoices, goods received notes and so on, is taken into digital form that is usable in the SAP core and other management systems, it’s possible to make a real dash toward efficiency.

So exactly what benefits would your organisation see from automating invoice processing? How would it improve overall financial management, and what impact would it have on the existing IT infrastructure and day-to-day operations?

Doing the maths
Put simply, while traditional invoice management and workflow solutions deliver savings up to 40-50%, in a full
e-invoicing environment automation of invoice processing activity can bring about cost savings of 70% to 95% – making it a compelling business proposition for CFOs and finance managers.

Let’s be honest, the CFO probably doesn’t care about how invoice processing works, what he cares about is the numbers, and how to cut down on operational expenditure. Automating it meets this requirement by reducing the need for manual intervention to a minimum, delivering tangible cost savings and measurable efficiency gains.

Another key consideration for the finance department is clarity, and the ability to plan and forecast. By establishing an invoice automation solution and digitising invoices and collateral documents, valuable business data is unlocked. The resulting full visibility of the order and payment pipelines not only aids cash flow and projected cash flow planning but via the analysis of spend patterns and supplier activity, it enables increased innovation in supply chain management.

As a result, finance managers get a clear, top-level picture of what is happening now and what is going to happen in the future. Processes and business rules are more easily shared, understood and complied with by users, enabling better planning and easy identification of further savings opportunities. This ensures sound cash management and means that funds can be invested as effectively as possible, supporting continuous business improvement.

Data from invoice processing and accounts payable also provides a rich resource of information on how to improve business processes, and can easily demonstrate the investment value of changing business models and processes.

Making invoice automation fit into the SAP jigsaw
The advantages of real invoice automation are compelling, but what’s the best way to go about it, and how will it impact on existing SAP systems and business processes?

What’s needed by users – from CIOs to IT and credit control managers – is a solution that is easily and seamlessly integrated into the existing SAP platform, without requiring timely and costly upgrades and custom coding, a solution which fits snugly into the SAP picture and keeps the rest of the SAP implementation in its ‘vanilla’ state.

There are two ways of approaching this: to use a tool installed inside SAP or an SAP-accredited third-party tool working alongside SAP. You’d assume that a product programmed inside SAP would be the perfect fit, developed with the latest functionality and easily integrated. You would be wrong on both counts.

Much like SAP’s databases, office and business intelligence tools, which are often eschewed in favour of third-party specialist tools, third party IP workflow software inside of SAP is not as advanced or as flexible as some “outside” solutions. So-called ‘open-heart surgery’ solutions which operate from within the SAP environment also need to be professionally installed, integrated and maintained by SAP engineers, which can be costly and can require key systems to be newly customized or even re-done.

The fact that companies often run multiple new, old and acquired SAP systems within their organisation makes the open heart surgery approach an even worse idea. Implementation and permanent synchronisation could prove to be an IT nightmare. And that’s without factoring in any non SAP systems that need to be integrated into the overall process.

Plug it into the SAP interface, and go
The time and cost involved in implementing an ‘internal’ SAP invoice processing tool is precisely why many companies opt for an external third party expert system that is a module of a state-of-the-art purchase to pay solution.

SAP has well-defined interfaces which have been designed to support SAP-accredited tools and systems operating outside of the SAP environment. The advantage of this approach which is more analogous to key-hole surgery is that SAP organisations get the benefit of specialised third-party solutions, which involve minimally invasive installation, and which also have no impact on the running of core SAP systems.

The advantage of this is that you get a focused extensible invoice automation solution which delivers clear business benefits and extends process automation, yet also operates independently from SAP, and is as a result unaffected by any SAP upgrades, installs or changes for greater operational stability.

Adding up the benefits
Extending automation into the finance department provides strong functional and business benefits and unlocks very real potential for future enhancements. As a result, CFOs will be able to realise immediate and sustained cost savings, as well as having the clarity to optimise business processes and maximise investment opportunities. Financial managers will be able to exercise more control on the spending processes and make payments more accurately and timely.

In addition, true Invoice Automation will bring significant added value to ERP, by removing the need for dedicated data validation, cleansing and enrichment tools for purchase-to-pay processes. As a result, the quality and context of invoice data is improved, supporting greater overall visibility of processes and enabling effective implementation of corporate policies.

By opting for a SAP-accredited third-party automation solution, you’ll also get the buy in of the CIO, who has the reassurance of simple out-of-the-box installation and easy integration via certified SAP interfaces (Certified for SAP NetWeaver™) – meaning no downtime, no impact on SAP resources and minimal set-up cost.

The business case for real invoice automation and going beyond this certainly adds up. Isn’t it time you looked to deployment, A-SAP.

Bernd Kosnar eBusiness