Reflections on FUSION 2011 – Part 2

Before we get started with the article, I want to thank everyone who has taken the survey to my upcoming report so far – The response has been great, but we’re not there yet – so, if you have not taken the survey and have a few minutes today or this week, it would be great if you could contribute a little time to this upcoming research effort. The one requirement is that you must be a procurement practitioner (i.e. not a consultant or vendor).

Click here to take the survey

In exchange for completing the survey, you will get:

• A free copy of the final report
• A guarantee that no other company will contact you
• My personal thanks
• Discounted invitation to attend the inaugural CPO Rising 2011 event in September

FUSION 2011 – Part 2

The newly rebranded Institute of Financial Operations (“IFO”) hosted its 21^st Annual FUSION conference last week in Orlando with nearly 2,000 people in attendance. In our last article, we discussed a Keynote presentation about the WorldCom billion-dollar accounting fraud and more formally introduced our new partner, the IFO. Today we’ll look at one of the presentations that we particularly enjoyed (Sidebar: Ardent Partners also delivered two presentations at the conference which we may revisit at some later time).

List #1 – The Top 5 Changes Coming to AP

Bob Cohen of P2P provider Basware and Tom Flynn of Lavante, a provider of post-payment audit recovery services and supplier information management solutions, co-presented a future-looking presentation focused on accounts payable. I liked the presentation because (1) I like lists and (2) it’s a good list. Although I am in Orlando again this week, I unfortunately left my notes at home, so what follows are my views/thoughts and general commentary on their list.

1.  Increased attention on supplier information – In the larger P2P context, supplier information management will have the ability to drive supplier enablement, improve contract and SLA compliance as well as, supplier performance, and provide a valuable assistance in mitigating supply risk. As its impact grows, so will its adoption.

2. More focus on the network – There’s already good value being delivered by today’s small group of network providers but I believe that there is an opportunity for the different supplier and payment networks to evolve into something truly extraordinary. This is starting to happen and a few providers have some very good momentum. For the

3. Increased levels of AP automation – With the high percentage of paper invoices and paper/manual payments in today’s market, the increase in automation has to happen, even if it is slower than we prefer. We need an outside shock to this system to ignite adoption.

4. Increased collaboration – Internal collaboration: Perhaps to counter the globalization trend that has scattered many workforces across the globe, enterprises by necessity have taken deliberate steps to break down walls between their different organizations and eliminate departmental silos. External collaboration: Here is a video of my recent thoughts on supplier collaboration (albeit in a sourcing context)

5. Finance & Procurement cooperating more closely – Yes, yes, and yes. Read more about The CFO & the CPO here

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