The secret every e-invoicing project lead should know to secure success

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Editor Coda
Jul 23, 2013

Ouch! Don’t touch it! The fear and temptation that surrounds the hottest topic in the F&A shared services town just gets stronger and stronger. The topic? e-Invoicing of course. It’s hot today and in two, three, four years time it will be at fever pitch. There is no getting away from it. The truth is very simple and hard to deny. And it  only feeds the flame of desire and fear: desire to implement quickly, coupled with the fear of seriously getting it wrong.

We shouldn’t be afraid. We have, after all, introduced massive change in our organisations in the form of shared services. We have been the anathema in our company, the isolated, lonely figure causing pain in the short term to secure a greater corporate strength and agility in the longer term. So surely introducing another layer of change shouldn’t be too hard?

Maybe you are one of the thousands of people in our world that sit in a finance ‘function’ that churns the paper mill that is AP. In comes the paper envelope, and what follows is a painful, costly, backward process involving too many fingers, hands, people, minutes and dollars. And this is why we can’t get away from the monumental size of this problem: the longer AP remains paper-based, the longer finance will stay in the junior ranks of transaction processing and dealing with recording ‘business done’. To add value, create revenue, and sharpen the company's competitive edge, finance knows all too well that it needs to eliminate the paper flow.

So the desire is unquestionably there, in the mind of every shared services director, purchase-to-pay Lead and head of accounts payable that wants a truly successful F&A operation. There are a number of hurdles in the way, however, between the paper hell most of us live in, and the data, touchless processing fantasy that gets us out of bed in the morning.

Two months ago I wrote an article about the real and perceived obstacles in e-invoicing . If you are coming from a place  where you have a relatively high first-time match rate, the greatest fear I sense from the hundreds of F&A people I speak with regularly is about supplier onboarding. And this, ladies and gentleman, is the single thing that can determine whether your e invoicing project is truly magnificent or hiding in the corner of business-case disasters and project flops where you can only hear the occasional sob.

What do you need to do to pick up the project-victory prize and kill the fear that can leave you in the status quo? Here are just some of the supplier onboarding must dos that need to be tied into any e-invoicing project if you want to clinch success:

  1. Don’t be tempted to manage the supplier enrolment yourself. e-Invoicing is a tough business that requires deep knowledge and expertise. You can bet $1m that the required expertise does not exist within your AP, procurement or IT teams. Stick to your core business (making cars or cornflakes) and let the experts onboard your suppliers (the Baswares, OB10s and Certiposts of this world).
  2. However, this does not mean complete disengagement from you. Oh no! The third party you work with to manage supplier onboarding can go so far without you (but not very far), but they rely on your strong, unified and enforced message to really secure speedy deployment. Suppliers need to be told that e-invoicing is the only option, otherwise they will not participate. 

    So the message (letter/face to face presentation) needs to be void of choice. There can be no choice otherwise suppliers won’t move to electronic. If you can mandate the use of electronic invoicing, then do. I remember I did a bit of work with a high-tech giant and they communicated to their suppliers that their post room was closing down, so paper invoices couldn’t actually be received. As you can imagine the conversion rates were excellent and rapid.
  3. Have procurement co sponsor this project. e-Invoicing is not an IT project. Strangely it massively benefits AP, but will only be a success if procurement are engaged in the supplier onboarding communications effort – ie the letter is signed off by a very senior Procurement figure whom suppliers hold in great esteem.
  4. Success in supplier onboarding is a balance of carrot and stick. Regarding the stick, it is important to communicate the consequences of non compliance… but even more importantly, to stick to them when suppliers choose the path of non-participation. Don’t be the party that threatens but doesn’t follow through. This will put you in a very weak place.

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