The key to getting p2p(purchase to pay) to work effectively is having high quality data on a the goods that you purchase and an effective method of procuring services.
@UK PLC is unique in either integrating with suppliers ecommerce sites or building best of breed ecommerce sites for suppliers. This is a major advantage over catalogue management based procurement systems which are unable to handle promotional discounts, carriage or complex purchases. In our experience over 60% of goods are sold with these features, and invoices can not be exactly matched. This means that invoice tolerances are introduced and there is no drive for accurate pricing.
On @UK PLC there are no invoice tolerances, since all invoices should exactly match the requisition, and if not clearly their is either an error or a price change between requisition and order. This expectation of accuracy cleans up data, and ensures that the norm is that all requisitions, orders and invoices are accurately priced and provided the goods or service have been provided invoices can be automatically processed.
The key to this is the @UK marketplace, for goods and the @Quotes system for services. These ensure that all items are correctly priced and that services have been fully negotiated and quoted in advance and the price accepted by both parties, to ensure best value quotes can put put out to the entire marketplace as open quotes, and selected suppliers can then carry out an @Auction if appropriate.
The @UK marketplace includes the @Quotes system, and connects with all major finance systems. There is also an excellent p2p(purchase to pay) system @Purchase2Pay, that has full approval rules, budget lookups, receipting and invoice matching for customers whose finance system does not offer this functionality.
The @UK marketplace collects quality and performance information on all purchases, and this can be fed back into contract management and sourcing.
@UK PLC arrived at eprocurement from ecommerce as opposed to almost all other providers who came from a purchasing system background.
This provides @UK PLC with a number of unique competitive advantages.
B2C ecommerce systems have to be usable with out training, where as most procurement systems are unusable with out training.
ecommerce sites always have the correct prices including carriage, discounts etc. All catalogue based procurement system are unable to cope with carriage calculations, promotional discounts and sometimes even straight forward volume discounts.
As far as we are aware @UK PLC is the only eProcurement system with connections into all major banks for credit card acceptance
B2C ecommerce is not a trusted environment, eprocurement is normally a trusted environment and eprocurement processes often have flaws that were exploited at the start of B2C ecommerce. As far as we are aware @UK PLC is the only eprocurement system with PCI/DSS certification.
@UK PLC passed the 1 million user mark back in January 2010, and has achieved critical mass. We believe this is more users than all other UK eprocurement systems added together, and probably the largest eprocurement system globally.
In addition @UK PLC has a strong track record in EDI , our original parent company @Software PLC wrote one of the top 10 EDI sites which was a shared system used by over 100 manufacturers to trade with all the major supermarkets. @Software PLC also wrote financial systems along with expert systems and computer aided application development for a blue chip client base.