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Exposed Cloud Data is a $28 Million Cyber Risk for the Average Company

cloud
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Technology

Exposed Cloud Data is a $28 Million Cyber Risk for the Average Company

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The average company with data in the cloud faces $28 million in data-breach risk, according to a new report from Varonis. The Great SaaS Data Exposure examines the challenges CISOs face in protecting data across a growing portfolio of SaaS apps and services such as Microsoft 365, Box, and Okta.

The study highlights how hard-to-control collaboration, complex SaaS permissions, and risky misconfigurations — such as admin accounts without multi-factor authentication (MFA) — have left a dangerous amount of cloud data exposed to insider threats and cyberattacks.

For the report, researchers at Varonis analyzed nearly 10 billion cloud objects (more than 15 petabytes of data) across a random sample of data risk assessments performed at more than 700 companies worldwide.

Key findings from the Varonis report include:

  • Most companies are sitting on exposed data in the cloud. A whopping 81 percent of organizations had sensitive SaaS data exposed.
  • Companies face dangerous cloud data risks. In the average company, 157,000 sensitive records are exposed to everyone on the internet by SaaS sharing features, representing $28 million in data-breach risk.
  • Broad internal data exposure is a real problem One out of every 10 records in the cloud is exposed to all employees — creating an impossibly large internal blast radius, which maximizes damage during a ransomware attack.
  • Missing MFA makes attackers’ jobs easier. The average company has 4,468 user accounts without MFA enabled, making it easier for attackers to compromise internally exposed data.
  • Sitting-duck admin accounts leave companies vulnerable. Out of 33 super admin accounts in the average organization, more than half did not have MFA enabled. This makes it easier for attackers to compromise these powerful accounts, steal more data, and create backdoors.
  • Untenable permission structures pose a big challenge. Companies have more than 40 million unique permissions across SaaS applications, creating a nightmare for IT and security teams responsible for managing and reducing cloud data risk.

About Varonis
Varonis is a pioneer in data security and analytics, fighting a different battle than conventional cybersecurity companies. Varonis focuses on protecting enterprise data: sensitive files and emails; confidential customer, patient, and employee data; financial records; strategic and product plans; and other intellectual property. The Varonis Data Security Platform detects cyber threats from both internal and external actors by analyzing data, account activity, and user behavior; prevents and limits disaster by locking down sensitive and stale data; and efficiently sustains a secure state with automation. Varonis products address additional important use cases including data protection, data governance, Zero Trust, compliance, data privacy, classification, and threat detection and response. Varonis started operations in 2005 and has customers spanning leading firms in the financial services, public, healthcare, industrial, insurance, energy and utilities, technology, consumer and retail, media and entertainment, and education sectors.

EDI
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

EDI’s Role and Evolution through Technological Advances

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Designed to automate the processing of information in a “zero paper” perspective, electronic data interchange (EDI) has not stopped moving forward since its inception. Thanks to the numerous advantages it offers in terms of business collaboration, it has become a seemingly indispensable tool within companies. But on a concrete level, what is EDI? How has the technology evolved over the years? Let’s look together at the uses of EDI over time. 

 

How EDI works: definition and regulatory context

 

What is EDI? 

In principle, electronic data interchange (EDI) can be likened to a dialogue between two computers and pursues a very simple goal: to exchange electronic documents between trading partners. By replacing paper document exchanges, electronic transactions have made it possible to significantly reduce human intervention. From this point of view, EDI, therefore, offers companies numerous advantages:

-Greater speed and reliability in processing information

-Reduction of operational costs

-Reduced errors and improved relationships between trading partners

For the exchange of data to be structured, it is essential to adopt a common standard recognized by the parties.

The format matters

Inevitably, along with electronic data processing comes the need to use a standard format that enables the system to read and understand the documents received. This format defines the type and form of the expected information, for example: integer, decimal, dd/mm/yy, etc. In this way, it is possible to share a common language used by the sender’s computer system and that of its recipient.

EDI standards 

There are numerous EDI standards, including ANSI X12, UN-EDIFACT (and its many variants EANCOM, GALIA…), VDA, TRADACOM, etc., and each of them has defined its own syntax and data dictionary. New standards based on the XML metalanguage have since been added to these historically popular standards, just as has been the case with HL7 industry standards used in healthcare or generic frameworks such as UBL, eb-XML, and UN-CEFACT. In addition, each standard includes numerous variants such as ODETTE or EANCOM for EDIFACT, resulting in ANSI version 5010 or EDIFACT version D12, Release A.

Before companies can exchange their electronic documents, they must therefore choose a common standard and version. Most of the time, they then use an EDI translator to automatically convert data from internal software or an application service provider.

Internet and XML metalanguage put EDI to the test

In the last decade, the overwhelming spread of the Internet and XML metalanguage have had a considerable impact on EDI. EDI/B2B software houses have taken advantage of these technological advances by aiming to facilitate the use of this tool within companies. In addition, all recent developments in EDI interoperability standards are based on XML syntax and use API-type exchange protocols.

EDI emerges as an online service 

The first commercial offerings of outsourced EDI type became popular in the early 2000s. These platforms had the advantage of outsourcing all EDI exchanges to external companies, regardless of the partners, systems and file formats involved. SaaS (Software as a Service) therefore made it possible to eliminate the many obstacles that held back EDI implementation.

EDI in Saas greatly simplifies the uses of this new technology. It can be used without major investment, to the great benefit of cost optimization. You can send or receive messages directly in the format of your ERP without the need for resources or an in-house EDI expert.

B2B integration: what’s the future for EDI? 

By automating the inter-company core business, B2B integration allows different stakeholders (customers, suppliers, business partners) to work more streamlined and efficiently.

Also known as B2B gateways, these integration solutions differ from the first generations of EDI platforms in that they bring a general, rather than a technical, view of the core business. By ensuring that different formats are taken care of, and multi-protocol transmission is possible, these B2B gateways allow you to model your core business processes and provide tailored monitoring. All of a company’s complex processes are thus integrated into a single platform. In addition, these B2B integration solutions can be offered on-premise for on-premises use, or in the cloud and thus be accessible from anywhere, such as Generix EDI Services.

Although process management or data processing engines are generally open to all use cases and formats, some EDI service providers have chosen to verticalize their solution for certain core businesses – this is what is happening in banking, healthcare, and supply chain. This allows them to speak the same language as the users and focus on each industry’s practices regarding data format, process type or security challenges.

Undeniably, the uses of EDI have evolved greatly since its inception, particularly due to the technological advances made since 2000. Thanks to APIs and blockchain, there is no shortage of prospects for further evolution, making EDI more than ever a solution of the future that can improve the efficiency of multi-company collaboration.

Generix Group North America provides a series of solutions within our Supply Chain Hub product suite to create efficiencies across an entire supply chain. From Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Transportation Management Systems (TMS) to Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and more, software platforms can deliver a wide range of benefits that ultimately flow to the warehouse operator’s bottom line. Our solutions are in use around the world and our experience is second-to-none. We invite you to contact us to learn more.

This article originally appeared here. Republished with permission.

software Maintenance
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

Maintenance Software Myths That Are No Longer True

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Software for facility management is nothing new. The underlying technology has been available since the early 2000s. The best facilities management software programs include capabilities for detailed asset tracking, digital checklists, handling service requests, work order requests, and resource management. 

Despite the availability of such software, a large segment of maintenance teams has yet to make the switch to utilize facilities management software; instead of relying on manual processes, paper checklists and excel reporting.

In this article, we identify 4 common reasons for not adopting facilities management systems, typically known as Computerized Maintenance and Management Systems (CMMS). We argue that with advances in software delivery, in particular, the availability of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery, these reasons are simply no longer valid. 

The 4 Most Common Myths of Facility Management Software

 CMMS Is Expensive

For a long time, only enterprise companies could afford online maintenance software. Acquiring a software license for an on-premise system would start from tens of thousands of dollars and all-in costs could end up in the millions.

One key reason behind the high costs is that software providers used to have to hire a small army of expensive enterprise sales staff to travel to the facilities management company to conceptualize a customized software program, decide how the system should be installed on in-house servers, and consult on the setup and implementation process. So each project required significant time and resources to implement. On top of that, organizing on-premise upgrades required substantial client interaction that increased ownership costs.

However, as the industry became more comfortable with cloud-based solutions and as new cloud-native systems emerged, the cost structure for delivering CMMS reduced drastically. Cloud-based SaaS CMMS software is intrinsically scalable. Small facilities can start with a low-cost plan, or sometimes even a free plan. Cloud-based SaaS CMMS systems can be utilized from anywhere in the world without the need to deploy on-premise servers and can literally be implemented in minutes! This means that the software providers need not hire an expensive enterprise sales force and also benefit from economies of scale. These savings are being passed on to the facilities managers. 

Cost should no longer be a barrier to CMMS implementation.

 Maintenance Management Software Is Hard to Learn

Another misconception about maintenance management software is that it is difficult to learn. That may be true for legacy CMMS as the adoption process may require significant effort to memorize complex digital workflows and may even require paid training. As a result of the cumbersome onboarding experience, many maintenance managers struggle to get their entire team on board. 

So, why are many legacy CMMS software so difficult to use? To put it simply, they were developed before the evolution of modern UI / UX design and when complex functionality took precedence over user onboarding and experience. CMMS software developers simply took it as the norm that clients must spend considerable effort to learn their software.

However, as SaaS software became prevalent with a predominantly client self-service model, CMMS SaaS software providers began to realize that ease of deployment and ease of use were necessary pre-conditions to achieve SaaS scalability. With a low-cost subscription model, not only can more long-tail clients be onboarded, they can be onboarded more quickly. Clients could self setup and self-configure, reducing the amount and time for pre-sales and the level of customer support required.

Transitions are Tough

This myth involves not only the need for learning mentioned above but also involves the assumptions that entering the necessary data, such as asset data, to get the CMMS going is time-consuming; and that the new CMMS cannot co-exist besides current processes.

Both assumptions are wrong. Data input nowadays mostly involves a one-time CSV import. Checklists can also be created from available libraries.

Modern SaaS-based cloud CMMS systems also support a gradual transition from manual to digital. Checklists can be exported to PDF for printing. Individual modules can be utilized as and when the team is ready, for example, starting with the low-hanging fruits such as fault reporting, before moving towards more data-intensive processes such as preventive maintenance.

Cloud CMMS is Not Secure

This myth exists not only for CMMS software but also for any other cloud software, including accounting and HR systems. Yet, in almost all software verticals, cloud software is gaining market share. Even in the most sensitive verticals, such as healthcare and banking, regulators have permitted the use of cloud software.

Cloud software is not by definition less secure compared to on-premise deployments. In fact, given the level of physical security at the data centers of most large cloud computing providers, cloud deployments are often more secure compared to on-premise deployments.

The correct approach in analyzing the cybersecurity of CMMS software is not to dismiss all cloud software as insecure, but to check if appropriate cloud security measures have been deployed, including physical, infrastructure, data, application, access control and endpoint security.

Maintenance Management Software Made Easy

Modern CMMS solutions like FacilityBot are leaps and bounds ahead of their early predecessors. By re-imagining how facilities management software should be, we built FacilityBot from the ground up to be affordable, user-friendly, easy to deploy, easy to use and feature-rich.  

We believe that giving the easily justifiable Return on Investment for digitizing Facilities Management processes, there should no longer be any reason for facilities managers not to use a CMMS system to manage their operations.

______________________________________________________________

Patrick Sim, Co-Founder of FacilityBot. My interests include creating a messaging-first facilities management system that facilities managers love and building other software systems.

edi deployment
Archives, Global Trade Daily, Software

EDI Deployment: What are the Obstacles and How to Overcome them?

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Sending commercial documents physically, by fax, or even by email is over. Since the late 1990s, these exchanges have been gradually replaced by electronic messages (order or delivery vouchers, invoices, etc.), which allow the automation of processes. To do this, companies are now using EDI, an acronym for Electronic Data Interchange. EDI is the exchange of commercial documents from one computer to another, in a standardized and automated manner. Despite offering many advantages such as speed, reliability and traceability of exchanges, EDI is still not used by all companies. How to explain this situation? What are the obstacles to implementing EDI? Focus on the main obstacles to making EDI the norm in companies, and how to overcome them.

 

Implementation costs

Developing an EDI solution is a substantial process for a company. It is a two-pronged project involving:

-Full-fledged IT project management, with its classic phases of analyzing existing information, choosing a solution, configuring it, then deploying and maintaining it;

-an impact study related to the digitalization of manual processes in the company and its business environment

In fact, the ROI – Return On Investment is faster and more substantial when exchanges between partners are regular and recurring, regarding significant volumes. This is why small organizations rarely benefit.

To reduce these costs, there are many ready-to-use services available on the cloud. Offered by experts like Generix Group with Generix EDI Services, they allow for a quick start-up at a lower cost. Additionally, their use is charged per use, which favors small and medium-sized companies.

Difficult implementation for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

Beyond the financial investment required, small businesses often lack the expertise to begin an IT project like this. If they can call upon an EDI supplier to handle such considerations, the process undeniably requires time to acutely understand the offers and analyze their needs.

This is a necessary step to find the pricing model that best meets the business needs of the company. Choosing an offer and an EDI supplier requires a preliminary analysis of the commercial transactions to be processed, and thus the volumes of data involved. Without this initial review, the company may face significant additional costs.

Several alternative solutions are offered to SMEs or very small companies that do not wish to invest in a fully automated EDI solution. They have the advantage of being inexpensive to both buy and use. They are mainly offered in SaaS mode, but are also compatible with EDI solutions used by client partners. These solutions include WEB-EDI, SmartPDF and online OCR.

Diversity of technologies and rules of standardization

EDI is even more interesting for a company as its entire ecosystem can use it. When deployed among different players in the same sector, it generally encourages partners and competitors to do the same. Thus, EDI has a strong presence in:

-Mass distribution

-The Agri-food industry

-Automobiles

-Electronics

-Aeronautics

-Pharmaceuticals

This dynamic therefore most often depends on the main contractors in the sector. If Airbus and Boeing adopt EDI with their suppliers, the entire aviation ecosystem moves in this direction. Indirectly, this impact can extend to nearby sectors with common suppliers, such as the naval or automotive sectors.

For an industrial company at the crossroads of several industries, it is complex to master the different standards and technologies of each sector.

In this case, the ideal scenario is to use EDI services in SaaS mode offered by mature players who have already deployed their solution in several sectors. By sharing processes, it is then possible to reuse at lower cost connectors and technologies that are already proven and financed.

Implementation and deployment time frame within each entity

Faced with relatively long implementation times, companies sometimes turn to alternatives to EDI to digitize their data exchanges more quickly. This may be a document entry and collection portal, or an OCR solution. Keep in mind that they do not offer the same automation capabilities, so these intermediate solutions will never bring the same quality benefits as EDI.

Again, the best way to bypass delays and implementation difficulties for an EDI system is to retain a service in SaaS mode. Hardware and/or software costs are eliminated, and configuration costs are significantly reduced due to the pooling of technologies between network members.

Synchronous trade dynamics

With the development of internet and e-commerce technologies, integrations between application components increasingly require real-time interactions. It involves knowing, for example, the position of stock, obtaining updated prices, or the status of a completed process.

During its start-up period, EDI relied on asynchronous file-sharing technologies. This still corresponds to the need to exchange certain commercial transactions. Additionally, it is necessary to associate it with API management, usually with REST and JSON technologies.

Be attentive, however, not to oppose EDI and API. Digital data exchange can be based on all forms of syntax or language such as XML or JSON. Data transport can also be carried out by protocols close to web services such as EDIINT AS2, SOAP, or REST.

In summary, it becomes necessary to combine the management of EDI and APIs. Fortunately for businesses, most EDI services offered in the cloud are actually open to most B2B integration technologies including MFT, EDI, API, MOM, etc.

Deploying EDI brings about several obstacles: limited adoption in small businesses, diversity of technologies and standards, and sometimes long deployment times. However, the emergency of technologies such as APIs and blockchains alleviates these challenges, thereby ensuring a bright future for EDI. Want to know more about EDI’s benefits and its development prospects?

VIEW THE GENERIX EDI SERVICES SOLUTION

This article originally appeared on GenerixGroup.com. Republished with permission.

manufacturing innovation
Archives, Global Logistics, Global Trade Daily, Stories

Manufacturing Toolbox for Next-Level Productivity

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The industry of manufacturing has had a common theme throughout its history and that’s of constant improvement and innovation. Not many players in this industry continue to manufacture the same way as they did in their infancy years. This is due to the competitive nature of manufacturing. In this ultra-competitive field, manufacturers must ensure that they’re innovating their products and systems to keep up with the quickly changing demands of the consumer. But meeting this demand is only half the battle – the other half is keeping up with the advancements of the industry.

Advancements in technology bring a whole host of new challenges that manufacturers must recognize, identify, and address. One example is the increased dependence on automation in manufacturing factories. This change requires the need for more skilled workers due to the complexity of the advanced systems at play. These systems require a deep understanding to function properly and keep your factories producing. Integrated manufacturing systems today require a multitude of highly specialized capabilities. If workers can’t adapt, organizations find themselves struggling to stay competitive with the rest of the field.

To remain competitive, manufacturers should have several tools at their disposal that go beyond their physical equipment and technology innovations used in their facilities. These tools are ideas manufacturers can keep in their toolbox and use to produce next-level productivity. For example, one of these tools can be an investment in regular maintenance, ensuring that your machinery stays in service for as long as possible. The result being higher productivity and fewer costly downtimes.

There’s more than one kind of tool necessary for success in manufacturing. Here are some concepts and ideas you should have in your toolbox to yield higher productivity and to stay ahead of the game!

_______________________________________________________

Tate Pearson is the Senior Director of Engineering and Technical Support Services. Since joining Advanced Technology Services (ATS) in 2010, Tate has served in several leadership positions to drive consistent operational excellence and growth. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Purdue University along with an MBA from the University of Iowa and is a certified Safety Trained Supervisor.

Archives, Global Trade Daily, Special Reports

5 DevOps Trends that Demand Your Attention

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One of the great things about my job is that I get to go-to software developer conferences all over the world and listen to people being extremely smart. When you watch enough smart talks, read enough articles, and talk to enough people trying to get stuff done on the ground, it gets easier to spot trends—just like it’s easier to see irrigation patterns from the air than from the ground.

Here are the five trends I think you should watch for in 2020.

1. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, but not Continuous Release

I was just at DeliveryConf (which was great and you should try to go next year, but in the meantime, here is a link to the talks ). At the conference, companies of all sizes and maturity levels described how they were working toward the CI/CD goal of getting code into production more quickly. The hesitation we were all feeling our way around was that we want continuous deployment to production, but most consumer and B2B businesses don’t want to change the user experience that often. Simply put, we don’t want Continuous Release.

In fact, customers frequently resent change, especially when it forces them to retrain users in a new workflow. The thing a user knew how to do automatically is now moved or missing, or there is some new option that no one knows how to use effectively. Interface changes in popular software can mean that companies spend millions of dollars in retraining. Anything that interrupts a user’s unconscious competence and forces them to think about what they’re doing slows them down.

Release is a business decision, and it often is safer and cheaper and better for users if all the changes come at once, so they can all be discussed and taught at the same time. CI/CD, on the other hand, is a technical choice. But that doesn’t mean customers need to experience that cadence, as long as you can deploy without releasing.

2. Leveraging existing workflows

Similarly, there is no reason users should have to learn new workflows just because the tools their software group is using have changed. I think this year, we’ll see a lot of SaaS vendors work with existing enterprise tools to make those tools more powerful, without changing the user experience much, if at all.

I think of this as leverage. It doesn’t matter to a user if a form is backed by a spreadsheet that needs to be manually imported or if it’s wired directly to a CRM. The user has applied the same amount of effort, but the new tooling has moved the fulcrum point, and the user’s work is more effective.

3. Personalization

We don’t all want the same things, as we can tell from the Dark Mode Wars. As our bandwidth and information have changed, so have our expectations about how much we can make our technology spaces personally comfortable.

A great example of this is the Google Now app on Android phones. You can tell it what sports team you follow, and then the app will deliver more news about that team and sport. But it also gives you the option to hide gameday spoilers if you’re not going to be able to watch it right away. They aren’t hiding that information from everyone, or even fans of that team, but they are personalizing the experience by protecting you from knowing the score of the game before watching it.

Personalization gives users more control over their experiences. It also provides more options than would otherwise be feasible to present globally. We can’t be all things to all people, unless we allow people to choose which subset of all things they want, and then allow those subsets.

4. Accessibility

The other exciting possibility of increased personalization is better support for different accessibility needs. The US has had web accessibility standards since 2000, but they haven’t been enforced or adopted evenly. That said, we have seen some recent exceptions.

The Supreme Court just ruled against Dominos in a lawsuit alleging that the pizza company failed to comply with accessibility standards. I’m not going to say “this changes everything”, but I will say this might be a good time to be an accessibility consultant who can help teams retool quickly.

The interesting part, and the thing that meshes with personalization, is that different people can have different accessibility needs. Someone with low vision needs solutions that may be incompatible with tab-based navigation, which again may be hard to align with screen readers. Rather than trying to make a single “accessible” page that meets none of those needs well, we’ll use personalization to tune for exactly what different people need.

5. Scientific thinking

This is an interesting outflow of our emphasis on data and metrics. Now that we are doing a better job of democratizing access to statistics and metrics, it’s easier for everyone in the company to understand how changes affect user behavior. Rapid releases and Progressive Delivery make it much easier for us to see how our choices work out in near-real-time. That means it’s possible for anyone—not just the UX team—to see how changes play out. With that visibility, we also can form a hypothesis about how a change will affect the data and then look to confirm or reject the hypothesis.

The scientific method is not heavily taught in most computer science programs, because it wasn’t until recently that we had the fast feedback loop that would make it useful. However, at least in the US, most schoolchildren are taught the basics in elementary school. They learn to ask critical questions like:

-What is the current state of the system?

-What change am I making?

-How can I measure a change’s impact?

-Was the impact what I expected it would be?

-Do I have any evidence for why or why not?

We need to be able to ask these questions at the team and individual level and get meaningful answers. We can then use those answers to iterate rapidly and stay attuned to what users want and find useful. What’s more, we can avoid spending months building things that virtually no one needs or wants.

What do you see coming in 2020? How will this play out in your company or industry?

________________________________________________________

Heidi Waterhouse is a developer advocate at LaunchDarkly. She is working in the intersection of risk, usability, and happy deployments. Her passions include documentation, clear concepts, and skirts with pockets. As a developer advocate, Heidi bridges the experiences of external and internal developers and spends time listening, thinking, and learning deeply about the business and technical challenges that face each group.

Fintechs
Archives, Commentary, Global Trade Daily

Excellent Service is the Hero of the Fintech World

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Customer service isn’t what it used to be—in a good way. The financial world has witnessed rapid technological advancements over the last century, but customer service remains a steadfast priority through it all.

Ensuring a good experience for buyers not only gives companies an edge over their competition, but it has practically become a requirement for company growth. With the increasing popularity of information-sharing websites and apps like Facebook or Yelp, reputations can expand or shatter within moments.

Fintechs are in a unique position as the liaison between customers and their suppliers. However, they tend to limit services offered to suppliers in favor of a more customer-oriented focus. As such, supplier support remains a well of untapped potential. How is this important, and why should fintechs care about suppliers?

Redefining “end-to-end”

“End-to-end,” from a B2B payment perspective, defines the customer’s processes from the time they receive an invoice to final reconciliation. Fintechs that prioritize customer-focused solutions risk their reputations by not providing decent supplier support. In reality, suppliers are customers too. Though they may not be required to pay for the back-end services that fintechs offer, they are just as capable of leaving reviews of their poor experiences on social media.

Nvoicepay recognized this long ago and redefined what “support” meant in the B2B payments space by dedicating teams for both customer and supplier assistance. Our daily interactions with suppliers act as a valuable means for us to determine the most beneficial improvements to our solution. It has paid off so far: The services we provide to suppliers who seek payment assistance have earned our support teams a consistent satisfaction rating of 98%. Clearly, the need for AR services within AP solutions is out there.

Suppliers: The new customers

Fintechs often completely disregard supplier support. In some ways, this approach makes sense: customers pay for the service. This often means that suppliers are reduced to a “commodity” status. Tales of suppliers being strong-armed into accepting certain payment types are rampant. To no one’s surprise, this method for supporting customers does not encourage stable, long-term business relationships.

To improve our own services, Nvoicepay has explored ways to make suppliers feel like more than just a cog in their customer’s AP process.

Nvoicepay’s vendor enablement services offer a medley of benefits that ease the burden from both AP and AR teams. When a supplier joins our robust network, they become immediately payable by all current and future customers. When the supplier needs to update their information, a single call or email to Nvoicepay covers all bases, thus limiting touchpoints and mispayment risks. Customers aren’t required to maintain extensive payment details for their suppliers—it’s all done in-house by Nvoicepay’s supplier support team.

Making payments is also a breeze. Suppliers who are used to being pressured into specific payment types are pleasantly surprised to be offered alternatives. Credit card—commonly preferred by customers looking to limit their payment file count—can be a hardship for some suppliers. Nvoicepay’s holistic approach enables customers to submit a single payment file for all payment types, letting suppliers choose from credit card, ACH, or check options without extra work on the AP side. This symbiotic process maintains healthy business relationships and improves workflows for all parties involved.

A new industry standard

By choosing a SaaS that treats your suppliers well, you’re getting the whole AP support package. Without supplier services, any payment follow-ups wind up in the laps of your AP team—not exactly the groundbreaking automation you were promised.

While it’s likely not the first thing on your mind when you browse for AP solutions, choosing one that also benefits your suppliers gives you an overlooked advantage, and will leave you with both a happier AP team and satisfied suppliers. Ultimately, a solution without a holistic approach to the “end-to-end” process is no solution at all.

Alyssa Callahan is a Technical Marketing Writer at Nvoicepay. She has four years of experience in the B2B payment industry, specializing in cross-border B2B payment processes.