Accounts Payable News^®

Vishal Patel, Research Director, Ardent Partners

Continuing with our launch of the ePayables SMARTset the second tool in the series is an ROI calculator for AP automation. This tool is of course complimentary to the ePayables Business Case Template that we introduced earlier. An ROI model goes hand in hand with a business case and this tool is specifically designed to calculate the ROI for an investment in an AP automation solution.

By Ted Kondis, President and General Manager, Ariba, Europe

"In today’s business world, it’s not just what you know, but who you know and how you connect with them."

Throughout history, businesses have attempted to capitalise on advances in technology to drive step changes in their performance. In the 1980s, the advent of client-server technology and desktop applications simplified routine tasks such as producing documents and calculating spreadsheets to make individual employees more productive, and share information more efficiently with their peers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the World-Wide Web spawned a slew of applications that automated function-specific information flows and streamlined processes such as finance, human resources and purchasing, and, to some limited degree, enabled collaboration across the enterprise.

Vishal Patel - Ardent Partners

The Business Case Template for AP Automation is part of the Ardent Partners SMARTSet™(Supply Management Assessment and Research Toolkit). The SMARTset is a comprehensive set of research tools and templates designed to help AP organisations navigate the solution selection process and maximize the value driven from investments in AP technology. The five-document series includes:

For many in finance departments, discovering the “cost per invoice” has become the latest “holy grail”. This is mostly because it’s seen as a good barometer by which to judge the overall health of an organisation. And yet, as recent research from YouGov shows, 40 percent of all respondents in the UK, Spain and Germany were not able provide an accurate figure for this, a figure which rises to 52 per cent of those in France. Curiously, the same survey discovered that the overwhelming majority of people across Spain, France and Germany were satisfied of the overall “cost of finance” within their organisations.  Bearing in mind the fact that the majority were not able to accurately pinpoint the cost per invoice, this must mean that to some extent Finance Directors and others, are using a certain amount of lateral thinking rather than using solid facts in their decision making.