Just following up from Will’s excellent post here, I came across a story from ioma, which speaks briefly about the importance of senior management buy-in for successfull EIPP project execution. Anyone who ever ran a project knows that people are the key in terms of successful delivery. Buy-in at the highest level is vital. A real killer for any project is movement of key people, especially the project champion. Give any project, you can always find a champion. Move the champion and you will see the emotional drive disappearing – ever heard of the term “pet project”. One of the key problems with large long projects are promotions. Obviously you want to promote good people to retain their continuous loyalty, but by doing this you end up moving them away from the project, thereby loosing the Champion. How do you manage such conflicting human resource issues?
According to Michelle Ross of RS Electronics (USA), the time spent on preparation of a business case was vital to senior management buy-in and subsequent execution. The benefits she identified include:
- Timely receipt of invoices by customers (increasing the ability to utilise discounts)
- Elimination of “lost” invoices in the mail by customers
- Notification that customer’s shipment is en route
- Reduction of time spent opening incoming mail
- Reduction in all associated mail costs for RS Electronics (paper, postage, clerical time, etc.)
- Possibility of improving RS Electronics cash flow cycle
To me, the greater advantage of any of these technologies are three fold:
- Ability to improve cash flow cycle, i.e. much improved working capital management
- Ability to improve profits by reducing operating costs
- Ability to bring operational efficiency and accountability – reduce wastage and increase value addition
There are lot more reasons than this why you ought to consider e-invoicing/EIPP solution. In some cases, the key driver may not be any of the above reasons, it may well be the most trivial. This again proves that what’s important to one person or an organisation may not necessarily be important to another.
Crawling through edocr library of EIPP documents, I found these three gems written by none other than Accountis. These should help any business think about developing a business case for senior management buy-in as well as recording initial objectives, giving an early opportunity for accountability.
