Monday 6th January, 2014

Walking along a hale-strewn, windswept and lightly flooded street, I found myself uncharacteristically drawn to the warm (ok, dazzling neon, but dry) glow of Furniture Village and its near neighbours, SCS and Oak Furnitureland. Enticed for the first time into these back-drops to December and early Jan TV, I found myself in the centre of a small flurry of salespeople tripping over themselves to offer tea, hot chocolate, cake, biscuits, sweets, or anything, anything at all in, not that surprisingly, empty shops.

Feeling not unlike the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman (just sadly minus the leg inch and ok, lots of other things, plus the added English embarassment at being treated well by shop assistants), I decided that the New Year would bring with it a whole new look and replaced almost everything in our sitting room.

And New Year is like that. Whether we want to or not, we can’t help but think of the future and see our current situations in a new light. Of course, the same is true both in our workplace and in terms of how that work will change and develop in the year ahead.

e-invoicing and early payments

The tail end of last year saw a flurry of activity around early payments and supply chain finance and this trend is likely to grow in 2014 as a combination of factors such as the squeeze on the economy, the difficulty in lending from banks and a need for greater corporate liquidity, better supplier relationships and cash forecasting continue to make themselves felt. The difference in the year ahead will lie with the continued expansion of e-invoicing platforms alongside payments platforms - as demonstrated by the creation of the Tungsten Group and Basware’s partnership with Mastercard. E-invoicing itself will continue to grow as companies become more aware of the benefits it can bring and as influential bodies continue to add their weight behind the economic argument.

Big Data

When you add this to the benefits provided by the continued growth and capture of Big Data, the possibilities for tightly connected business process are endless. In other words, Big Data has enabled us to become analysts. We have, or we will have, the ability to access the who?, how?, when?, how much? information about multiple players and at the flick of a button, as well as have access to detailed company history and credit and risk ratings.

What’s a Head of Process?

All of which will lead to an ever tightening collaboration between the different departments of purchase to pay. Where the platforms enable high visibility and opportunities to make efficiency savings – why not take advantage of that by making sure Procurement, AP and Finance are properly connected? And, of course the drive towards more automation will reduce headcount in the year ahead, but it will also increase opportunities – driving new job titles like Head of Process and Global Process Owner in a corporate structure change designed to cement collaboration into the business culture.

Increasing globalisation. Emergence of Nigeria

And those opportunities really are global. If the world has taught us one thing over the last 10 years, it’s that events in one part of the world can have an immediate, dramatic and often unpredictable impact on another, and our own economy. So with the spread of globalisation, cloud technology, as well as generally greater security – outsourcing has grown to be a major industry – throwing up multiple savings, benefits and opportunities at home as well as abroad.

What will be increasingly different in 2014 will be the flexibility in this market. The traffic is no longer one way, and some organisations will re-shore, or near-shore some, if not all of their activities. And increasingly we’ll witness the growth of the so-called MINT market encapsulating the emergence of countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Other newcomers will include countries like Columbia.

Greater supply chain scrutiny

This year is also likely to see a greater scrutiny of the supply chain. The downward pressure on prices will continue, but will be counter balanced by an unwillingness to suffer the bad PR (and subsequent market loss) suffered by Tescos, Primark and others last year.

In an increasingly fast-paced business environment, those with the tools to analyse and capture the data they need in an open and easy way – with sound risk and spend management strategies, will be the ones which succeed.

And for those built optimistically close to flood plains and crumbly cliffs, an update on the corporate Disaster Recovery programme probably wouldn’t go amiss these days either…