Real-Time Economy Community - New ideas

Recommendation

Bikesh Raj Upreti — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:20:50 GMT

Introduction to Problem

The City of Tampere would like to fully use electronic invoicing in order to handle all of its incoming invoices. The first steps towards this ambition have been made as early as 2003, and currently around 42% of the city’s invoices are handled electronically. In order for the city to reach its goals completely, the following four key challenges have been identified:

1. Getting internal units to advertise electronic invoicing to suppliers

2. Selling the idea of electronic invoicing to suppliers

3. Improving the general attitude towards electronic invoicing

4. Possibilities when forcing the suppliers into using electronic invoicing

When providing a comprehensive strategy aimed at promoting electronic invoicing, we will look at two different aspects: the internal and the external. Each aspect needs to be approached in its own way, in order for the entire strategy to be successful.

Recomendations

Internally

· Appointing an influential spokesperson for the e-invoicing project. This could be the mayor of Tampere, but also someone else who appeals to the employees and may be able to change people's attitude towards e-invoicing. Preferably this spokesperson would also appeal to an older audience.

· To promote the internal e-invoicing, providing incentives based on number of internal e-invoices sent.

· Training sessions in order to teach the basic skills necessary in order to at least be able to process electronic invoices.

· Creating a promotional website with concrete information about the process and its benefits, frequently asked questions and their answers, a message board and discussion forum.

· The formation of an e-invoicing ‘information team’ for the entire duration of the policy transition. The members of this team should become recognizable ‘faces’ that are involved in the entire process.

Externally

· Sending out a letter to all suppliers in which a strict deadline will be set. It should be made clear that after this date, invoices that are not electronic will be sent back.

· Introducing a unit based incentive system based on the number of electronic invoices.

· Sending out, perhaps together with the letter mentioned above, a concrete business case to all suppliers explaining the benefits of e-invoicing that demonstrates benefits of e-invoicing numerically also, preferably, a business case from one or more of Tampere’s actual suppliers.

· Offering beneficial payment terms for suppliers that use electronic invoices (for example, faster payment if the invoice is electronic).

· Instead of charging for extra costs in case of a paper invoice, Tampere should offer a discount (by NOT charging extra costs) when invoices are sent electronically. This way, suppliers cannot simply pay off their ‘feeling of guilt’, but can get an actual benefit for going digital.

· Setting up a promotional website with concrete information about the e-invoicing process and its benefits, frequently asked questions and their answers, a message board and a discussion forum. This website should be targeted especially to Tampere’s suppliers.

Preparation for After 01.01.2011

Since, Tampere city has already decided to go into e-invoice; it should not wait and expect suppliers to change. It should be more proactive to tackle the situation after the changes take place. We strongly recommend being proactive and assessing the suppliers’ progress towards the desired state of change, e-invoicing. If suppliers are less likely to change then Tampere city should start preparing to change the supplier. Information regarding availability of alternative suppliers, cost benefit analysis of losing a supplier and finding a new supplier should be conducted as a preparation to be committed towards accepting only e-invoices. The resultant impact must be assessed and preparation should be made

Possibilities of Force

Our view is that e-invoicing is likely to become standard practice in the future.

The benefits are obvious and it is only a question of time when e-invoicing diffuses outside large organizations. We are not so optimistic about B2C electronic invoicing. There will always be individuals, who are unable or adamantly do not want to handle invoices in an electronic format. Also, the fact that traditional invoices are a good B2C marketing channel greatly reduces e-invoicing attractiveness.

We believe, that the City of Tampere alone is not able to effectively change the e-invoicing situation in consumer market. A nationwide information and marketing campaign organized by the government should be launched to educate consumers on the many benefits of e-invoicing. At the moment, when the environmental issues are hugely popular and even the "ordinary people" are willing to change their old habits, the nature saving feature of e-invoicing should be emphasized.

To increase the attractiveness of e-invoicing in B2C settings, there are a also few other things we can suggest. Our vision of a functional B2C e-invoicing framework is the following:

invoicing operators must work together with banks to create a business model, where consumers receive rich e-invoices within the web banking interface

companies must be able to attach marketing messages alongside the e-invoice

consumers must be able to trust the bank to keep full archives of their invoices (preferably as long as the banking relationship lasts).
consumers must be able to trust that the bank informs them of all incoming invoices and invoices approaching due date (email notifications for free, GSM notifications for a nominal fee)

Conclusion

- project has ‘lingered on’ since 2003.

- Going fully electronic IS possible, see for example espoo.

- Question therefore is, is the current strategy sufficient?

- World will go towards e-invoicing anyway, and so will tamperes suppliers. In that sense the change is inevitable.

A centralized digital portal for school absence

Jan Gerrits — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:01:33 GMT

The Netherlands has compulsory education for children until the age of 16. The monitoring solutions of school attendance have so far not been too uniform or integrated. The introduction of a digital register for highschool students who are skipping lessons will lead to administrative costs savings of 4.5 million Euros, according to a Dutch deputy minister in her statement on Tuesday 19th of May in a session of the Dutch parliament. The introduction of such a portal should take place this year.

Currently the absence of a highschool student should be notified by schools to the student's municipality of residence. This is a complicated process since schools have students from many different municipalities. The reporting process will be hugely simplified by this centralization action. A digital portal should lead to increased effectiveness through improved visibility and thus intervention for education inspectors.

Numerous occurrences of absence without leave have proven to be a reliable indicator of a student dropping out of secondary school altogether. A centralized system is a step forward in the attempt to reduce disallowed absence. In the Dutch educational system parents are held responsible for the school attendance of their children. They are fined in structural cases of absence. More transparency is therefore warranted, a monitoring trinity of schools, inspectors and parents should be formed, with access to the aforementioned portal. A mobile application can help monitoring students' attendance (as used in some schools).

Salary files electronically to bookkeeping from Palkka.fi

Johanna Kotipelto — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:58:02 GMT

Palkka.fi proudly presents a new feature starting April 2009:

A business using Palkka.fi can now save the salary files as a CSV-file instead of printing them out as paper files. The CSV-file can then be sent to the bookkeeper electronically. Up until now the files had to be printed out to be mailed to the bookeeping - where they had to be either typed or scanned into the accounting system.

Thus the new feature builds up considerable savings both in time and delivery expenses for both parties. It helps reducing the administrative burden on businesses and promoting the information society also in the SME sector.

Specifics on the feature: Palkka.fi-tiedote 21.4.2009 (in Finnish)

Questions European tax payers should ask

Bo Harald — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:23:48 GMT

I wrote a blog post on this

http://www.finextra.com/community/fullblog.aspx?id=2815

Using games to create awareness: De Blob

Jan Gerrits — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:44:48 GMT

Often public organizations are accused of passive or reactionary public relations strategies. I am a great supporter for the adoption soft selling approaches by government institutions. The world of (mobile) gaming e.g. can be an effective channel for informing customers.

Utrecht is the main rail transport hub of the Netherlands. The city decided to drastically renovate the railway station and city area around it. Citizen needed to be informed about the drastical changes taking place in the cityscape in years of renovation and new build. As part of a soft selling campaign, the city of Utrecht assigned students (of the city's academy of fine arts) to make a game to help people familiarize themselves with the changing and new cityscape. The game landscape of course mimics the one of the city.

The game was freely downloadable from the city's internet portal (and still is: http://www.utrecht.nl/smartsite.dws?id=144982. The page includes screenshots of the original, featuring the renovated railway station area.) The game and the strategy proved to be a success. In a playful way people could get acquainted with changes taking place and could form a spatial image. As a consequence it has raised more acceptance for the renovation activities among the inhabitants of the city.

The game has been converted for the Wii console. And it was one of last year's best received titles for the platform. (More information about this version: http://wii.ign.com/objects/947/947046.html)

E-Health

Hendrik Hielkema — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 09:50:55 GMT

One part of electronic government and our society is the storing and retrieval of medical data. Medical errors cost many lives per year in europe, if the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, fysiotherapists, dentists, ambulance staff and all others involved in the medical work have access to the right information than some of these errors can be prevented.

To give them this information the government is establishing the Electronic Medical Record. what do you think, should every medical staff person get access to your information,?

RTE Summit brings together the leaders in productivity and competitiveness of networked economy

Sari Lehtinen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:33:03 GMT

Most of the 1990's and early part of the current decennium was the period of achieving real time in information management and decision making within the organization. Real time in this context often means "within a day". Looking into processes between organizations (e.g. supply chains and networks) e-invoicing and e-payments are internationally the most discussed real-time enterprise solutions today. Even there the penetration of eInvoicing is at very early stages in Europe and Scandinavian and some other small countries are leading the adoption currently. In parallel to emerging electronic billing and invoicing a growing number of Finnish enterprises and some public sector bodies have taken several steps to adopt eProcesses throughout their value networks. These are the true leaders of Real Time Economy today and not only in domestic perspective but internationally as well.

In Real-time Enterprise Summit you will meet many of these Finnish and Finland based international forerunners who are all joined in the mission of growth and productivity through widening adoption of real-time solutions in their networks.

Essential keywords to dive deeper into the topic are e.g. real-time networked economy, productivity, data/document interchange between companies and organisations, sustainability, growing importance of mobility and geoinformation and altogether change in the way how things can and will be done in the future.

As a chairman of the day and on behalf of Tekes' VAMOS and Verso programmes I welcome you to join the Summit and the discussion here in RTE Community.

Please feel free to share your ideas!

Seppo Ruotsalainen
PROFict Partners Ltd.
Tekes VAMOS and Verso

See updated version of the Summit programme at www.soprano.fi/rtesummit.
Information on Tekes' VAMOS and Verso programmes can be found at www.tekes.fi/vamos and www.tekes.fi/verso.