Development of an interoperability maturity model for e-invoicing

Today’s organisations are forced to deal with the increasing pressure of gaining and retaining competitive advantage, cutting costs, improving quality and reducing time to market in order to stay competitive against domestic and global competitors. The ability to improve the efficiency of the invoicing process and to take advantage of further benefits, encouraged especially companies with large invoice volumes to invest in e-invoicing. In the past, much has been written about the advantages and saving potentials of electronic invoices and some experts in this field expect that mass adoption of e-invoicing will be achievable in the following years. But until today the e-invoicing market is not yet mass market suitable due to different reasons. A major problem is that each further implementation of a business partner implicates a cost-intensive and time-consuming IT project, which hinders the further adaption of e-invoicing. Many companies are not interoperable due to lack of IT skills, infrastructure and budget. Furthermore there are abundant definitions what interoperability means and how meaningful interoperability can be achieved. The IT managements of companies are reliant on tools in order to determine the as-is situation of a company and to derive and prioritize improvement activities. Maturity models are useful tools for the clarification of these considerations. Therefore the aim of this study is to adapt and develop an e-invoicing interoperability maturity model which provides an assessment framework for the determination of the degree of interoperability of companies and to provide improvement measures which address the implementation challenges in the context of e-invoicing.