This article is part of the new co-author series of the EEI Platform. It was originally written by Arild Haraldsen board member of NorStella and published on: digi.no. NorStella - Foundation for e-Business and Trade Procedures - is appointed by the Norwegian Government as the national contact point for all international standardization activities in the field of electronic business and trade facilitation
The 6th EXPP European Summit (on e-invoicing) took place in Munich this week. 320 delegates from all over the world had signed up. Norway was represented by 25 participants, mainly from b2bConnect Group and the banking network.
Bruno Koch – an e-invoicing expert and the conference chair- presented something interesting market numbers and made some adoption assessments. He pointed out that Europe was the leader in this area. Fueled by the European Commission’s E-invoicing Directive, Governmental projects, and the strong position of the large number of message brokers.
Bruno Koch
The picture is more mixed in the U.S., where payment by check is still the dominant factor. There are many standards and there is no strong or dominant message communicator. Interestingly, it was pointed out that Brazil is now in full swing. Koch also pointed to Russia as a major emerging market. Something that was a little hard to believe after Grigory Povarov presentation - with a high degree of irony. He explained how difficult it was to deal with the originally paper-based public demands, and how often the government interfered in the individual company’s billing practices. The word corruption was not used, but it was close ….
Surprisingly, Bruno Koch said that the financial crisis – what in Europe has become a crisis of public budget – would create a strongest motive. He said that Greece would soon become a leader in e-invoicing. Simply because they may have to cut public budgets two and get the better of the big, black economy country.
Milan School of Management
Professor Alessandro Perego of Milan School of Management Presented a comprehensive survey of the obstacles that existed in the prevalence of e-invoicing. He pointed out that the flora of standards was no longer a major obstacle because Europe now seems to agree on several standards. The law is no longer an obstacle too: the new EU E-invoicing Directive presents clear enough guidelines even though not everything is resolved. It is therefore not external circumstances are hindering the wide spread adoption of e-invoicing. Instead the barriers are a the seller and buyer. One can see the benefits in communicating e-invoicing, as well as overcoming the barrier of having collaboration between buyer and seller. Perego also pointed out that the benefits only come when one can create values throughout the entire value chain with all types of business documents, not just e-invoicing. E-invoicing in isolation will result in a gain of 05.03 per euro. Exchanging all documents throughout the value chain, leads to gains of about 65 euros with payback in one year!
Jonas Edlund
Yet the question remains how one gets small and medium enterprises (SME’s) into this “wave”. This is the big market in Europe, and in something countries, small businesses dominate the private sector, for example in Austria, and also here in Norway. It was never answered correctly how one takes in this market segment, but Jonas Edlund from Pagero was onto something when he pointed out that the public sector’s initiatives to make a platform and infrastructure for e-procurement and - purchasing were not adequately Prepared for small businesses (see Also DIFIs mention of this project here).
Tim McGrath
The confusion surrounding the question of what standards apply was solved: Tim McGrath from OASIS mentioned one that it hardly ever comes to one single standard; the challenge is interoperability between multiple standards. This has already been recognized and that is why the European Commission has requested the creation of a standard data model that contains semantic description of all the known elements included in an invoice. This is now made by UN / CEFACT and is called the Cross Industry Invoice (CII). Based on this data model two different syntactic representations are created to suit various needs, the governmental UBL (in Norwegian ehandel.no Invoice format), and the banks ISO 200 222.
BSP Interoperability
One of the main focus areas of the conference was how message brokers, could cooperate. Both in Norway, Germany and Spain a set intermediaries worked together on a joint roaming agreement that guarantees seamless and free communication between message brokers. This was mentioned as a crucial prerequisite for lowering the threshold for the use of e-invoicing. But what remains is to establish a partnership with the banking network, so that the seller and buyer can freely choose between message brokers. Finland was highlighted as a country where many gateways had solved this problem, see in particular the presentation of Thomas and Bonwetsch.
Eva Hervidsson
Eva Hervidsson from Nordea emphasized that she cannot see how banks and non-financial intermediaries’ message won’t cooperate. Nordea has such a collaboration (with Tieto). She emphasized the “mind set”, i.e. the willingness to cooperate makes life easier for customers, especially small and medium- sized companies, and also such cooperation helps to increase the total market.
Main conclusions
What conclusions can one draw out of this conference? The three most important are perhaps:
The impetus for the development of standards and infrastructure for e-invoicing-disclosure is the public sector. But How to fulfill the needs of small suppliers the public market?
- The non-financial methods and the banking message network must enter Into practical Cooperation. Experiences from Finland, and Especially the Cooperation with Nordea Tieto (and now also Pagero) are examples of this.
- ERP vendors must be taken into account, by establishing an ERP Forum for e-invoicing.
Source: Digi.no (Norwegian)
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