The percentage of Vectren Energy Delivery (Vectren) customers using
electronic bill (eBill) delivery has nearly tripled in the last 18
months. Today, nearly 150,000 or 15% of all Vectren customers are
receiving their monthly utility bill via e-mail, eliminating the
traditional paper bill. This increase can be attributed to Vectren's
enhanced customer communication as well as the introduction of the
mobile version of Vectren.com, which allows easy access to eBill from
mobile devices.
More and more Dutch companies prefer sending electronic invoices,
instead of the paper invoice. Last year, another 15% of the Dutch
companies switched to e-invoices. Measured as the steepest growth rate
in one year, e-invoicing adoption in the Netherlands soared to an
impressive 39%. This became clear after analysing the responses in a
survey under almost 500 companies.
The advancement of electronic bill presentment and bill pay capabilities
represents a clear opportunity to reduce paper consumption, but it is
only one of several ways your monthly bills can help you achieve your
most pressing corporate goals. As more customers favor self-service
solutions, telecoms and utilities that provide effective online billing
tools are finding that they can save money, reduce churn, and do a good
turn for the environment in the process. Although these benefits are
being realized, organizations need to stay ahead of the curve by
ensuring their e-billing processes keep up with market expectations.
There is a difficulty in building a business case for e-invoicing. The
natural starting point is a traditional paper process and there is an
irresistible temptation to begin to count the savings offered by the
counting the cost of paper. A sheet of A4, an envelope and a stamp.
Well it's a starting point I suppose.
And then there's the
general efficiency saving because it's quicker and easier to deal with
electronic invoices compared to paper. This is true of course but having
7 hours of work to do per day instead of 8 doesn't save anything. It
just makes like easier.
More manufacturers want to automate their procure-to-pay (P2P) processes
with paperless, cloud-based electronic invoicing -- or e-invoicing --
for their suppliers but often find the ERP integration inadequate,
analysts say.
Progress on integrating e-invoicing with back-end ERP is "very slow,"
said Duncan Jones, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., based
in Cambridge, Mass. "Companies like SAP and Oracle haven't really done a
very good job of promoting the right answer. Their approach has been a
pull approach. Suppliers have to manually log into a portal. In my book,
it's not really e-invoicing."
