Earlier this year, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) adopted the new PEPPOL trading platform to manage its procurement processes. PEPPOL stands for the Pan European Public Procurement Online (network). In a nutshell, it enables electronic versions of purchase orders and invoices to be exchanged digitally between buyers and sellers with no manual intervention.
Many public and private-sector entities are weighed down by financial administration. Procurement and payments are largely manual processes that take up a lot of time. These manual processes are prone to human error such as lost or duplicated invoices. However, where automation has been introduced prior to PEPPOL thus far, there is often an inefficient tangle of different systems and protocols, all struggling to communicate efficiently.
