Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Mark Schaffner, VP of Marketing at Verian.

It's an uncomfortable topic.

There are some people who become irritable, demanding, and yes --somewhat emotional, for about a week at the same time every month. Their physical demeanor changes, they look tired, break out, and sometimes crave chocolate or chips more than usual.

They are accountants.

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Click here for the first post in this series. And if you're looking for a broader primer on purchase-to-pay systems, tips and organizational maturity models, you can download our recent Compass research brief on the subject, A Foundational Look at P2P Technologies, for free today.

Even before you get on the capability/maturity map for purchase-to-pay systems and processes, you have to start somewhere. And for a surprising number of companies (still today) that somewhere is what we call "Stage Zero." Stage Zero is nothing to be ashamed of. Nor does it imply that an organization has done nothing around processes and systems.

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Brussels (Belgium), Jan. 27, 2012 /E-Invoicing Newswire via Spend Matters/ -- Regulators in the European Union and Member Countries passed legislation, officially published in the 7 January 2012 Council of the European Union Summary of Monthly Acts that includes updated requirements for electronic invoicing (also referred to as "e-invoicing") providers serving public and private sector organizations within member countries. Act 2012/421/EU represents Council Decision of 4 January 2012 to regulate e-invoicing transaction tariffs at a nominal value per invoice. Act 2012/422/EU (4 January 2012) regulates the purchase (acquisition) price of network operators and providers.

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Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Kurt Albertson, Associate Principal, Procurement Advisory at The Hackett Group.

The Hackett Group has long emphasized the need to balance risk and control within the P2P process, leveraging the "optimal" end-to-end channel rather than simply defaulting to the often overly controlled three-way match process. By doing so, organizations balance efficiency and effectiveness within the P2P process, freeing up resources to focus on higher value activities such as sourcing and supplier management.

And while Hackett has long published performance differences between world-class and peer organizations, recent analysis highlights some interesting perspectives when the P2P control environment is compared by geography. These insights come from Hackett's 2011 Purchase-to-Pay and Procurement benchmarks, in which we segmented performance by North American and Western European operations.

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As a former consultant, I've spent more than my fair share of time coming up with maturity models for this and that. I've found over the years that in many functional areas as well as the technologies that support them, the nuance between one step and another in a various maturity framework might seem small, or even difficult to detect. But for procurement, there's such a vast discrepancy between the sophistication of organizations, perhaps owning to how long it took for the function to gain a voice inside most companies -- not to mention how long technology evolution evaded the function.

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There are lots of technology providers serving as great proxies for general market growth. For a while, we used to consider Ariba the bellwether vendor in the P2P sector, but now we tend to see the ERPs and their solution partners as more generally indicative of adoption and general trends, owing to the growth and adoption of SAP SRM, among other tools. For sourcing, spend analysis, and the like, the growth of BravoSolution, Zycus, Iasta and others in the same categories make for a good general measure of market growth (as do Aravo, Hiperos, Achilles, CVM and others for supplier management tools and services).

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On Monday morning, GEP announced it had acquired Enporion. For Spend Matters' initial coverage of the deal and background on the two organizations, you can read our first take immediately following the announcement from yesterday. We'll continue our analysis in this post, taking a look at some additional details about the transaction and the acquired organization. We'll also look at what it means for customers and competitors in the final posts in the series covering the deal. Late last week, GEP shared with Spend Matters that the ink had just dried on the transaction and they were excited to immediately get started on the work of integrating the two companies and application suites. GEP executives noted the transaction brought eleven new customers to the organization, include Duke, Progress and a range of other large customers in the utilities industry.

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Please click here for related posts in this series:

An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: P2P, Data and Systems Linkages (Part 1)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: P2P, Data and Systems Linkages (Part 2)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: Discounting and Payment (Part 1)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: Discounting and Payment (Part 2)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: Supplier Enablement (Part 1)

When organizations hit Advanced or Level 3 on the Spend Matters e-invoicing maturity scale, 100% enablement is typically the goal. Getting to this level may require engaging in multiple enablement options inclusive of machine-to-machine connectivity, supplier portals, email and even scan/capture/conversion services to capture the tail-end of small suppliers (although we would argue that scan/capture should not really count as electronic invoicing because of the latency involved at different stages of the process). Perhaps most important at the Advanced maturity level is that procurement and AP organizations do not tolerate supplier fall-out in the process. To achieve such a high level of supplier enablement success, it is common for organizations to begin to dangle carrots to suppliers for participation. This could range from the basic (e.g., visibility into invoice and payment status) to the more sophisticated (benchmarks/KPIs provided back to suppliers).

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Please click here for related posts in this series:

An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: P2P, Data and Systems Linkages (Part 1)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: P2P, Data and Systems Linkages (Part 2)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: Discounting and Payment (Part 1)
An Electronic Invoicing Maturity Model: Discounting and Payment (Part 2)

We've written before that supplier enablement is fundamental to a range of procurement initiatives, but absolutely core for eProcurement and electronic invoicing. All too often, this area was an afterthought in early P2P implementations, yet when organizations devote enough focus to it themselves -- or work with a partner to do it on their behalf -- successful supplier enablement and on-boarding programs can drive high levels of overall vendor adoption. As part of the on-boarding process, AP and procurement organizations are often focused on a handful of key fields to capture and maintain including supplier contact information, TIN numbers, banking details and VAT/tax requirements (especially in Europe). Increasingly, the supplier enablement step may also include additional data enrichment and risk checks (e.g., parent/child relationship, diversity status, financial stability) covering all, or a subset, of suppliers.

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