1st December, 2015

This time last week I went to the super trendy Wallacespace in Clerkenwell for the UK leg of Basware Connect. I’ve been to a few of the Basware events in the past, but in the words of Warren Daniels, Marketing Director UK, this year they decided to “tear up the book and do it differently.”

So, the doors were thrown open to a melting pot of familiar faces, commentators and analysts in the industry as well as existing Basware customers. And the buzz this created was something I love to see. Despite all the talk about collaboration over the last couple of years, too often the different areas of P2P do not attend the same events. Not so here.

In fact, if you'd dipped into one or two of the presentations across the Treasury, AP and Procurement streams, it would have been impossible to leave without a better understanding of how deeply interconnected the functions now are. But it's always good to hear it from the mouths of the experts, and there were some excellent presentations from former CFO SuperDry, Chas Howes and industry experts such as certified fraud examiner Rich Lanza, Michiel Steeman, Professor Supply Chain Finance and ex CIPS President Craig Lardner.

And the power of the network was something that Pete Loughlin from Purchasing Insight talked about in his presentation on the future of AP. He pointed out that we’re living in a world where banks, buyers and the supply chain increasingly need to be considered as part of a broad B2B ecosystem. Take AP for example, over the last few years it's shaken off its dusty image and is no longer just a back-office function, separated from finance and procurement. The many advances in processes and technology have meant that AP can happily sit at the top table.

As Pete said, twenty years ago you wouldn’t have advised a recent graduate to consider AP, but you would now. And on the point of collaboration, he put forward the view that these days AP is both finance and procurement.

And if it all seems a little Back to the Future, there is a world where this nirvana does exist, and apparently it's called "Electronic Land". The Holy Grail of this “electronic land” (as positioned by Pete) is one where people have been able to get away from the idea that an invoice is an A4 piece of paper and realise that its true value lies in the data it contains. And forward thinking organisations know that the best way of transporting that information is electronic – and not via OCR (an evolutionary important, but in Pete’s eyes, soon to be obsolete function), but via truly networked, computer to computer eInvoicing.

So although by rights we should all be transporting ourselves on hover boards by now, the internet of things, and the strength that lies in being connected in our B2B lives, will take us to places we can't even yet imagine.

Bring on 2016!

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