The golden rules for getting suppliers to adopt eInvoicing - Introduction

They have recently introduced “Park by Phone” in my local town car parks. It sounds great. Pay for your parking by mobile phone, no need to carry change, receive an alarm 10 minutes before your time expires and pay for more time remotely.

Being curious about technology, I asked the traffic warden how she knew who had paid. She proceeded to show me how, on a mobile device, she could call up a list of anyone who had paid by phone in the car park we were in. The list revealed that no-one had paid by phone – everyone was still buying tickets at the machine. Not to be defeated she pulled up the list for a car park nearby where phone parking was “really popular”. The list revealed that only one person had paid by phone. Two car parks – capacity 400 – both full – only one person had paid by phone – hmmm!

How often have we seen ideas which are great on paper and which are executed crisply from a technological standpoint, fail because the really important link in the chain, the end-user, didn’t get it? Remember Hutchison’s Rabbit, a mobile revolution in the 1980s which withered on the vine because no-one used it? I am sure everyone reading this could think of as similar example.

This is a very current issue in e-procurement. Several companies have technology that does the job well on both the e-procurement and e-invoicing front. EGS is one of these. However the winners, particularly in the e-invoicing space, will be those companies who are able to get suppliers to join their eco-system. On the face of it the proposition is compelling for suppliers. No more paper invoices to create; invoices are received and processed instantly by buyers and payments are made faster. Surely suppliers should be beating a path to our door – but they aren’t. There are several reasons why not but one of those is that suppliers already have an invoicing method that works, so many see adopting e-invoicing as a cost.

We have spent a lot of time focusing our minds on this subject. We call it “supplier adoption” and it is a complex subject – too complex to tackle in a single blog entry. But complex or not, it is a nut that we must crack to be successful.

We have developed a list of “Golden Rules” that we believe we have to make work in order to maximize supplier adoption. In a series of blog entries of the next few weeks we will look at each of these rules in detail.

Next time: We will look at the first of these rules which examines selling the benefits of e-invoicing to suppliers.