Research

The war is on in the B2B payments and last month at its annual user conference, AribaLIVE, Ariba, an SAP company fired off a big shot. As has become customary, Ariba uses the event to bring together its customers, partners, and staff, as well as industry thought leaders and media to share best practices and [...]

Ardent Partners’ research over the past few years has shown that while the average accounts payable department still lacks automation, executive focus, and general alignment with the enterprise, leading enterprises are using their AP function to a competitive advantage. That said, why is it that so many AP departments continue to face time, cost and [...]

The procure-to-pay (P2P) process is growing in importance within many enterprises as we’ve noted in many articles including here and here. As with any business process, optimization is key to creating value throughout the process. Within P2P, I believe that the main drivers of optimization include: Efficiency – from a cost, productivity, resource allocation and [...]

Networks, Networks, Networks…they’re all the rave these days and they will continue to be in 2014. The first of these networks, which were developed in the mid-to-late nineties, targeted the procurement function and were at the heart of the B2B internet craze. At the time, these “online marketplaces,” as they were referred to then, invested [...]

Today’s article will focus on a specific solution provider – Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) is a storage and information management solution and service provider. The company has approximately 60 years of expertise and boasts some 150,000 customers in over 30 countries, making them one of larger and more established companies to have entered the [...]

Actually, the market did. As you have already seen in other articles (such as this one or this one), Ardent Partners recently completed a fairly robust study on the accounts payable process and the technologies that are improving the performance and efficiency of the process. Cost is and always was the biggest driver for modernizing [...]

The last phase of the AP process is the scheduling, processing and execution of an invoice payment. In the US, paper checks are still dominant as a payment format; however, this is shifting rapidly. The migration from paper checks to electronic payments (e.g., ACH, card, wire transfer, etc.) is a trend that is only going [...]

Based on research from Ardent’s latest report – ePayables 2013: AP’s New Dawn The primary role of these solutions/services is to take paper-based documents and transform the data that lies within them into a usable electronic format which can then be processed in a more automated and efficient manner. The three solutions mentioned below are [...]

Several years ago, the structure of accounts payable groups began to shift to more centralized models. In 2013, centralization remains the preferred operating model with more than 80% of all AP departments operating in a centralized or shared services environment Based on research from Ardent’s latest report – ePayables 2013: AP’s New Dawn, which surveyed [...]

Download the full report here For most enterprises, conducting business today means managing an increasingly complex set of relationships with the ‘Extended Enterprise,” an ecosystem which has grown to include suppliers, distributors, partners and other key entities. And, while these relationships continue to grow in complexity, they are also increasingly important to a company’s overall [...]