Basware Connect Belgium guides participants to #SuperFinance

Informing existing customers and interested parties about the purchase-to-pay process and the opportunities for supporting this process in Basware's software was the main objective of Basware Connect Belgium on September 18, 2018. Duvel Moortgat brewery provided the inspiring backdrop for this knowledge event. ICreative was there.

Randall van Poelvoorde, along with robot Pepper, kicked off with an overview on the impact of exponential technology on society. Under the heading #SuperFinance, Basware Connect then continued. #SuperFinance is a term Basware uses for cloud-based financial administration with an effective purchase-to-pay process involving Artificial Intelligence (AI). 'Artificial Intelligence does not become responsible for making decisions. A CFO in the age of data cannot have a robot telling him what to do. That would be disastrous," Lauri Palokangas, marketing director at Basware, said in his keynote address.

Therefore, he says, AI does not replace managers, but managers who use artificial intelligence replace managers who do not. 'Indeed, technology doesn't do anything at all if people don't adopt it. We need to redefine the role of humans,' Palokangas said. According to Basware, it's all about the partnership between humans and machines. 'We typically own a car, but we can also rent a car by the hour. Mobility means unbundling a car,' Palokangas illustrates. 'In purchase-to-pay, it means unbundling each job into tasks and determining who should do which task.'

In Belgium, the terms purchase-to-pay and source-to-pay are not yet so well established. That is why Ruben Slagmulder, presales consultant at Basware, walked through the process steps in an interactive session. The participants in the room were able to participate live in an e-auction and were introduced to the possibilities offered by Basware's software to support the process.

Thinking differently

Also speaking were two Basware customers. Rental company Boels Rental processes some 300,000 incoming invoices from about 8,000 suppliers this year. It chose Basware several years ago to facilitate business growth and improve efficiency in the accounts payable department: to speed up the authorization flow and reduce manual input. There were several reasons to further automate the process.

Rob van der Hagen, manager Accounts Payable at Boels Rental, took a close look at the bottlenecks. For example, purchase orders were often created incorrectly, proofs of goods receipt were regularly missing and invoices were poorly recognized. However, the most difficult part of automating the accounts payable process was not solving these issues, but getting the internal organization to think again. Stijn Verstraeten of Europabank could endorse this. So the title of his presentation was, "Why do we have to change when everything works (perfectly)?

Europabank also went through a Basware AP automation project. The goal was to automate incoming invoices 100 percent and reduce the various Excel files. In addition, it needed an audit trail and a reporting tool. Verstraeten detailed all the phases in the project.

At the end of the day, there was an opportunity for a tour of the brewery which many took advantage of.

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