Today I’m going to re-visit the SMB market, which I’ve talk about before here. This segment of the market presents an extraordinary opportunity to relieve SMB’s of their paper-based (or excel-based) manual processes of getting paid, making payments and managing cash and introduce them to cloud-based automation that is affordable and built for them. We [...]

In my several years as an analyst in this space, it has always been apparent to me that the AP automation solution landscape is quite crowded and confusing with multiple providers offering different and varied capabilities to automate all or part of the AP process, making it that much more difficult for enterprises to select [...]

Supplier networks have existed for many years and over the initial years slowly gained in popularity. Today, however, these networks are a quickly growing trend and an increasingly cost effective and efficient means to process business transactions and in some cases more (e.g., supply chain finance, supplier discovery). Research from Ardent Partners recent survey showed [...]

As we think about the entire ePayables Framework (i.e., Receive, Process and Pay), it is during the “Pay” phase of the process that AP can work closely with treasury and finance to develop more sophisticated payment strategies and implement processes to optimize working capital (however, it should be noted that the efficiency and accuracy of [...]

For an accounts payable department, efficiency, effectiveness, and accuracy are key to its function and responsibilities within the enterprise. An AP department that lacks these attributes may result in suppliers not getting paid on time, errors within invoices and payments and overall delays in the procure-to-pay process. Establishing and measuring relevant metrics is an important [...]

Those of you who have already gone through this process know very well the challenges that arise when building a business case and trying to get approval for a project, during the selection process and after deployment of a solution. The solution selection process has multiple steps that can be difficult and lengthy and it [...]

Undeniably, the social network has forever changed and continues to change the manner in which people communicate, interact, collaborate and share information with their network of family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, people with similar interests, etc. That’s in our personal lives, but how have social networking concepts impacted the way commerce is conducted and how will [...]

The Request for Proposal (RFP) process can be a lengthy and tedious process and if not executed well, can result in serious consequences for the project at hand and its validity.  In most cases, an RFP will be issued once a project has been given the go-ahead by senior management and once a plan has [...]

Some years ago, the data capture market consisted of companies such as Kofax, Brainware, Captaris, DataCap, and Captiva, among others. Some of the companies in the space were sizable, many were small, but almost all were independent companies focused specifically on data capture. The current market has changed quite a bit with many of the [...]

This is something that was made very clear in Ardent Partners’ recent study (ePayables 2012: The State of the AP Market). As a function, AP can add a whole lot more value than data entry and responding to supplier inquires. There is an opportunity for AP to work closely with treasury and finance to develop [...]