Seeing the Opportunity

NetEDI have been on a long journey with Peppol. We first became aware of Peppol back in 2013, when one of our customers within the healthcare sector mentioned it as part of their E-procurement strategy. After working with our customer and assessing their procurement goals, it became apparent that Peppol was a major development within the sector and invested considerable resource on learning how we could best serve the needs of all our customers within healthcare in the future.

Years of innovation in the field of automatic document exchange meant we knew we could translate a Peppol message, so the next step was registering with OpenPeppol – the organisation responsible for the maintenance of Peppol specifications. Once our registration was approved, we then set ourselves the goal of becoming a Certified Peppol Access Point. This means that we don’t need another company to provide access to the network itself and we can reduce the number of possible failure points for our customers.

Fast forward to 2020, NetEDI are now one of Europe’s leading Peppol suppliers. As one of a select group of companies recognised by the European Union backed AS4EDI project, NetEDI are at the forefront of pioneering change through Peppol.

Our work with NHS Supply Chain

2017 was a pivotal year in our Peppol story, as it saw us put forward a successful bid to become NHS Supply Chain’s Peppol provider. NHS Supply Chain are the organisation responsible for the sourcing, delivery and supply of all healthcare products, services and food to NHS organisations and Trusts throughout England and Wales. Their huge operational workload sees them manage more than 4.5 million orders per year, across 15,000 locations and from over 800 suppliers.

Over the last few years we’ve worked extremely closely with NHS Supply Chain to aid them in implementing Peppol throughout their supply chain. Throughout this process we’ve managed communication with their suppliers, set up and tested all connections and liaised with 23 other Access Points. We’re pleased to say that over 200 of the suppliers we’ve dealt with on this project also decided to choose us as their Peppol solution provider, a number which we expect to grow in coming months.

Between January – July 2020, over £2bn worth of NHS Supply Chain orders were processed through our NeTIX platform, further cementing our role as the UK’s leading healthcare solution provider.

The Benefits of Peppol

One of the main benefits of adopting our Peppol solution is that we provide our customers with a ‘one-to-many’ connection. This means that we only need to connect them to the network once and they will then be able to transact with any other organisation within the network, regardless of who their access point is. Trusts and suppliers have the autonomy to transact messages including orders, invoices, credit notes, ASNs, purchase orders, dispatch notes and order acknowledgements with any other organisation they work with.

The Four-Corner Model

Our solution works within the ‘four-corner’ model.

We perform all the translation necessary to convert the message into the Peppol format and send it to the access point provider of your trading partner.

Additional benefits of machine-to-machine trading reduce the risk of mistakes in order and invoice input, by selecting an integrated solution with back office systems also speeds up the purchase to pay process and can automate labour-intensive manual tasks – this increases efficiency and will save money in both NHS and supplier budgets as well as freeing up resource which can re-deployed onto other projects.

NetEDI also pride ourselves in providing solutions that are scalable, flexible and made to fulfil the specific needs of businesses of any size within any sector. We provide an online portal for small/medium sized enterprises with low volumes of Peppol messages, and we have the capacity to integrate Peppol messages with ERPs for larger enterprises, connecting all their mission critical data onto one platform.

The Future of Peppol

Peppol will continue to evolve and introduce new technology to benefit the healthcare sector. Part of that evolution is the recent AS4 mandated communication protocol. From the 1^st February 2020, all certified Peppol Service Providers have been required to use AS4 as their communication protocol as this is the most up-to-date version and provides the latest security standards.

AS4 is secure because it encrypts the data. If anyone should try and intercept the message (invoices containing pricing data for example, or an order message with personally identifiable data) they won’t be able to gain or use the information. Messages are also digitally signed by the sender, so you can guarantee who the message is from and receive an electronic receipt. This will put a stop to any ambiguity as to whether an order or invoice has been received.

NetEDI is one of the few Peppol Access Points in the UK with an AS4 certification, ensuring that our customers can future proof their purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash systems by using the latest technology and security protocol.

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