Hawkins anticipates significant financial and productivity savings when she gets her first set of annual metrics next month. Among its benefits, the EIPP software allows GE to automatically validate every invoice it gets according to the terms of its contracts with each firm, rather than having lawyers manually review the bills for erroneous or duplicate charges. Hawkins plans to tie the EIPP software into the purchasing system this month. When bills come in, they’ll be checked against purchase orders to ensure that enough money has been budgeted?eliminating more manual data entry. In addition, the DataCert system will automatically deliver invoice details to GE’s Outside Counsel Management System, which Hawkins uses to analyze how the company spends its annual budget of more than $200 million for external legal help?yet more data that was formerly entered manually. By mid-June, 19 business units out of 30 and 250 out of 400 domestic law firms had gone online.

As a big spender, GE had plenty of clout to push its legal suppliers, many of them also large companies, online. Cavalieri, with AT&T Wireless, says competition for thousands of small business customers influenced her company’s decision to deploy EIPP technology last year. The company fielded an online account management, billing and payment application from software vendor Edocs for its 3 million small business and consumer customers. About 600,000 use it so far. The company is exploring a similar application for large enterprises that now get their invoices on a compact disc but felt more pressure to start with the small business customers that didn’t have an online billing and payment option. As part of AT&T Wireless’s online customer service package, electronic billing and payment has helped reduce customer turnover by about 20 percent, she says. Meanwhile, the company saves money by reducing the number of billing questions handled by call center reps.

...But Integration Takes Work

One can’t, however, buy an EIPP solution that comes already integrated with any ERP, supply chain, CRM or financial management system. John Van Decker, senior program director for application delivery strategies with Meta Group in Stamford, Conn, says it will take another three years before the major ERP vendors incorporate Internet-based invoice payment solutions into their accounts payable software. Gartner’s Litan says, "The biggest technical issue that companies have is integration with a legacy system or ERP system."

Hawkins says DataCert had to write a custom electronic invoice format so that invoice data from the outside law firms approved by an inside GE lawyer could be delivered electronically to GE’s accounts payable system, the Outside Counsel Management System and the purchasing system. Starting about a year ago, integration with the first two systems took about six months and "was a lot of work on our side and [DataCert’s] side," says Hawkins.