SAP

One of the more important jobs of the procure-to-pay (“P2P”) and accounts payable (“AP”) professional is keeping up with what is happening in the industry at large. This is critical for a few reasons, including skills development and the hunt for new technologies, but is sometimes difficult to do. That is why, every two weeks, [...]

There is significant enterprise value hidden in the supplier, or vendor, payments that enterprises make every month. Smart organizations realize this, and have begun examining their payments process to uncover every scrap of enterprise value possible. As a result, the supplier payments approval workflow has also started to be considered as part of a holistic [...]

The worldwide economic situation became more interesting last week. The United States enjoyed a barn-burner of a jobs report on Friday morning—312,000 jobs were created in November, while the unemployment rate held steady at 5.8%. Meanwhile, the Bank of International Settlements expressed some concern about the strength of the U.S. dollar and how that could [...]

Black Friday has made the leap from a solely United States event. The United Kingdom had local Black Friday sales on November 28, which resulted in police getting called to seven Tesco shops in the Greater Manchester area. What’s most interesting, however, is that U.S. Black Friday sales are estimated to have declined 11% year-over-year. [...]

Thursday afternoon, global software provider SAP AG (NYSE – SAP) announced its intent to purchase Seattle-based travel, expense and invoice management solution provider Concur (Nasdaq – CNQR) for approximately $8.3 billion (based upon the announced acquisition price of $129 per share). The agreement signals another major shockwave in the global enterprise solutions industry that follows on the heels of SAP’s 2012 [...]

On January 17, 2012, Basware kicked off the New Year by announcing that it had acquired First Businesspost GmbH (“1stbp”)for €12.2 million, which includes assumption of the company’s debt (€ 3.2 million). Before we get into an analysis of the deal, here are some key figures for 1stbp in the year ended 2011: Revenues: €2.4 [...]