Monday First Thing

Zig Ziglar, famed American author and motivational speaker, once said “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” As AP organizations look to transform themselves from tactical business functions to more strategic ones, they need to take an introspective look at where they are today and what [...]

This is actually a trick question…the answer depends on what you are spending your time discussing when you are with your suppliers. This is one of the topics we queried finance and Accounts Payable (AP) executives in our soon to be released Ardent Partner’s 2018 ‘State of ePayables’ market research report. The results were quite [...]

AvidXchange held its annual user conference, Revolution 2018, in Chicago last week and we both attended the full conference and the pre-conference partner meetings. AvidXchange, a North Carolina-based provider of invoice automation and payment processes for mid-market companies, has experienced phenomenal growth in recent years. That alone doesn’t make it unique since the ePayables market [...]

The way enterprises do business has changed significantly over the past 15 years and these shifts are reflected in the way ePayables and P2P solution providers go to market today. Historically, Accounts Payable (AP) was seen as a back-office function within the enterprise, and a very tactical one at that. Procurement, on the other hand, [...]

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Andre Hoddevik, the Secretary General for OpenPEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online), a European-based, non-profit international association whose purpose is to enable European businesses to easily deal electronically with any European public sector buyers in their procurement processes. Andre will be giving a session on eInvoicing May 8 [...]

Supply Chain Finance (SCF) is something that we are being asked about much more today than we have in the past. Many of the practitioners we speak with have heard the term Supply Chain Finance, but are not exactly sure how, and if, it pertains to them, and if it is something they need to [...]

Throughout my career, I’ve worked with hundreds of companies looking to automate their Accounts Payable operations. Typically, the organizations are drowning in paper, suffering from manual, time-consuming, costly, error-prone processes with little or no real visibility into outstanding liabilities and limited to no cash management practices in place. When I’ve engaged these organizations they almost [...]

After spending the better part of last week in Las Vegas at SAP Ariba Live, this week I headed to the beautiful Pacific Northwest to attend the SAP Concur Fusion in Seattle and wanted to share my thoughts and impressions of the event. The conference was well attended with over 3,000 participants making it one [...]

I spent the better part of last week at SAP Ariba Live in Las Vegas with fellow Ardent Partners’ analysts Andrew Bartolini and Matthew York and wanted to share my thoughts and impressions of the event. The conference was well attended with over 3,200 participants, making it the largest procurement or spend management event in North [...]

Supplier Portals, also known as Vendor Portals, have played a significant role in enabling more suppliers globally to transact and communicate with their customers across the P2P process. These portals have, without a doubt, been a positive development for Accounts Payable (AP) since they first started to appear roughly 15 years ago. But like the [...]