The aim of the EEI Platform is to reach as many people as possible and provide them by selecting instruments and activities with the biggest impact.

Looking forward to the second year of existence of the EEI Platform, we would like to ask your opinion on which instruments you think are the best to fit this aim. Of course you are invited to add your own thoughts.

Therefore, we will regularly post polls to have a clearer view on the community and to adapt our scope where necessary.

This first poll is about the focus on next year. What is your opinion on the following activities and instruments?

Thank you very much for your help!

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Poll: What should be the EEI Platform focus in 2010?.

Based on a Commission proposal from 2007 the European Union set itself an ambitious target of cutting administrative costs imposed by EU legislation by 25% by 2012.
Today the Commission publishes an overview of progress to date and sectoral reduction plans for 13 priority areas.

In total, the measures proposed by the Commission and under preparation would enable businesses to save around € 40.4 bn from € 123.8 bn on red-tape stemming from 72 EU texts and the measures that transpose and implement them in the Member States. Reduction measures put in place by the Commission or proposed by the Commission and already adopted could bring a reduction of EUR 7.6 billion.

Measures proposed by the Commission and pending adoption by the European Parliament and the Council would add EUR 30.7 billion to that amount. Preparatory work on further reduction could lead to the presentation of additional measures bringing further reduction of at least EUR 2.1 billion. Now it is in the hands of the co legislators to ensure that businesses can feel the difference on the ground.

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said: “The Commission is fully on track to deliver on its goals to reduce red tape for businesses.   B usinesses are already set to save €7.6 billion a year. That will become about €40 billion if Member States and the European Parliament back our proposals in full. But better regulation is a job that never ends. It is not just about changing bad rules, but making good rules work better, using new technologies and new innovation. Further streamlining European and national regulation – without compromising on protecting the public – will be a key to the next Commission’s drive to promote sustainable economic recovery.”

Vice-President Günter Verheugen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry, said: “Today’s package is the result of policy commitment and hard work to abolish unnecessary bureaucracy. The Commission has done everything in its power to achieve the 25% target by 2012. I invite the European Parliament and Member States to adopt all of our remaining proposals to make them fully effective for the European economy as soon as possible. It does not cost anything but would mean a boost of around 30.7 bn € for our enterprises, and especially for Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs).”

The EU administrative burden reduction programme will deliver an overall reduction of 40.4 bn € (33% of the estimated burden). It would come into effect, if all Commission proposals find the agreement of the Council and the Parliament. This is particularly the case for two major proposals, made at the beginning of this year, one in the field of VAT aimed at facilitating e-invoicing (worth € 18 bn), the other in the field of company law, exempting micro-entities from accounting obligations (worth € 7 bn).

The baseline measurement exercise has been completed and confirmed the choice made by the Commission to concentrate on the selected priority areas. This measurement exercise has also confirmed the vulnerability of SMEs to administrative burdens. Stakeholders’ involvement and the High Level Group, chaired by E. Stoiber were instrumental in evaluating the feasibility and in the identifying further reductions measures, which may be part of new initiatives for reducing administrative burdens during the next Commission.

Moreover, all Member States have now set ambitious national targets, as agreed in 2007.

The Commission will continue to ensure through its impact assessment system that requirements introduced by new policies are kept to the minimum.

The “Action Programme for Reducing Administrative Burdens in the EU” is an essential part of the Commission’s overall Better Regulation Agenda. The aim of this policy is to promote competitiveness, growth and jobs. Reducing regulatory costs imposed on enterprises is also in keeping with the Small Business Act and its “think small first” principle and is one of the key areas for action in the European Economic Recovery Plan.

Today’s announcement confirms that the reduction of administrative burden is a continuous exercise in view of achieving a real impact in every sector on the ground.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Proposals European Commission could reduce administrative burden.

Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) set up a Shared Service Centre in January 2007, centralising and streamlining back office functions including Accounts Payable. The Accounts Payable team processes approximately 120 000 invoices per annum on behalf of central services. Any solution developed will need to have the ability to process a significantly higher volume to cater for our Shared Service Centre expanding its services to schools and potentially other customers.

The County Council uses SAP R/3 ECC6 as its ERP system and has a contract with Serco who provide our SAP Environment as a hosted service and they undertake all configuration on our behalf. This contract runs until 2012 and any successful tenderer will be required to work in partnership with Serco to implement a solution.

Procurement transactions are undertaken using both SAP R/3 and SRM. The SRM module was implemented in February 2007 to coincide with the establishment of the centralised Accounts Payable function.

The next step in developing OCCs Accounts Payable function is to automate the input of invoices as far as possible, whilst improving the customer experience. OCC expects to make significant efficiency savings through the automation of the AP function.

It is expected that the solution selected will have the ability to scan paper invoices directly into SAP as well as utilise the technologies available to enable true e-invoicing. The successful tenderer will be expected to identify areas where true e-invoicing is achievable and implement this when the solution goes live.

Source: www.rfpconnect.com

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Oxfordshire County issues RFP for Accounts Payable automation.

The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) has just approved the Cross Industry Invoice (CII) Version 2.0 standard to enhance links between the business and financial supply chains and enable cross-industry and cross-domain interoperability. This common global standard is based on a set of business requirements from different industries and stakeholders in both the private and public sectors.

The CII, which is an electronic document exchanged globally between trading partners with a prime function as a request for payment, is an important accounting document and has potential legal implications for sender and receiver. It is also typically used as the key document for Value Added Tax (VAT) declaration and reclamation, for statistics declarations, and to support export and import declarations in respect of international trade.

The CII addresses the strong business need for large scale implementation of eInvoicing, in particular, offering valuable assistance for business and governments in exchanging structured data. It has international application and also supports the requirements of the European Commission Expert Group on eInvoicing. It will be complemented by a series of additional UN/CEFACT standards covering core supply chain processes including Quotation, Scheduling, Catalogue, Ordering and Despatch Advice.

The release of the second generation of the Cross Industry Invoice, together with ongoing work within the UN/CEFACT Forum, was welcomed by the CEN/ISSS Workshop/BII (European Committee for Standardization Information Society Standardization System Workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces on public procurement in Europe) as it allows them to move forward with their work on Implementation Verification of key business documents for use in procurement within Europe.

The above work was finalized on September 30th at the UN/CEFACT Forum in Sapporo Japan, attended by over 200 experts from over 30 countries.

The CII Schema is available from the UNECE website at:

http://www.unece.org/uncefact/data/standard/CrossIndustryInvoice_1p0.xsd

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: UN/CEFACT releases new eInvoice standard.

Today we release the new EEI Platform. We think of it as EEI Platform 2.0, because of all the improvements and alterations. So, why did we re brand our online platform and what changes have been made?

Some figures
Version 1.0 of the EEI Platform was released in November 2008. Up until now we welcomed over 100.000 visitors on our website and throughout our social networks and we can see an increase in visits.

We have sent out 15 e-mail newsletters to a steadily growing population of around 1.000 e-mail subscribers from over 45 countries worldwide.

We now retrieve information from over 145 online and offline resources and posted it at all kinds of Web 2.0 platforms, such as: LinkedIN, SlideShare, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Google News. We have also facilitated RSS subscribers and affiliate linking possibilities using Ping.fm. And we’ve connected quite a lot of people using these very same social networks.

All in all an enormous effort to fulfil our objectives: transferring knowledge, building networks, sharing information and promoting interests.

Why change? Evaluation after 10 months of EEI Platform
So, why change? Most of all because we believe that the EEI Platform should always be looking for ways to fulfil its objectives as efficient and effective as possible.

Our experiences in using Web 2.0 instruments at the EEI Platform the last ten months have lead to some interesting conclusions:

• We strongly believe that Web 2.0 tools are key drivers for the operation and development of the EEI Platform.
• We also believe that Web 2.0 can play a significant role in the development of the European E-invoicing Marketplace.
• In a connected world it is no longer sufficient to force your target group to come towards you for information. Instead ,they increasingly demand that information is brought to them. In short: a trend towards the push of dedicated information to each individual.
• Comments on content made by community members in all social networks should preferably be aggregated and displayed into a single publicly available stream.
• It should be possible to subscribe as a member of the EEI Platform using login information created at other social networks: Single Sign On.

Changes
Taking these conclusions into account we have changed the look and feel the EEI Platform. The entire list of changes and improvements is too long and boring to display here.  However,  some adaptations are worth mentioning:

• Information on e-invoicing is now supported with visuals, making it more attractive to read through
• Members have become more visible in the members section
• Members have become authors of the information they distributed to the EEI Platform. Information is automatically added to their profiles
• The EEI Platform allows non-members to post information on the website and e-mail newsletter on a pay-per-use basis
• The EEI Platform allows members and non-members to use the online platform for advertising and sponsor purposes
• The technical platform has been prepared for the integration of the EEI Community: a theme specific social network on e-invoicing (to be released within a few weeks!)

Moreover, further development is taking place as you are reading this. Please feel free to express your ideas or wishes sothat we can optimize the user friendliness. Just take look around our website and enjoy.

EEI Platform

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Introducing: EEI Platform 2.0.

This article is from E-invoicing Platform. Read the original post at: Belgium: E-invoicing can save companies billions.