When a company launches and rolls out an e-Invoicing initiative a key component is the supplier onboarding. Supplier onboarding is the process of initiating and establishing e-trading links with large supplier communities of varied capabilities.

There are now well defined critical success factors that guarantee the success of electronic trading community initiatives. Many e-trading initiatives are now reaching over 95% compliance in the first six months depending on the size of the community and its ability to embrace electronic initiatives.

Buyer organisations that own and operate complex FMCG supply chains have been at the forefront of applying process automation technology which require large scale multi-step on boarding projects.

Celtrino’s multi-step on boarding methodology is a classic example of community building and follows a predefined multistep outline. At Celtrino we refer to this approach as a classic onboarding methodology as it embodies best-in-class and proven approaches to successful onboarding and enrolment. Uniphar and the ADM Londis Group are both examples of how Celtrino’s on-boarding methodology facilitated the successful rollout of large scale projects.

Right, with that in mind, hopefully you’ll find this story of interest…

I recently read a fascinating piece by Tim Hornyak over at CNET News who reported on a physicist that can cut plane on-boarding time in half.

There are a number of remarkable things about this achievement.

First of all, it has the potential, or so the physicist at the centre of this proposed on-boarding methodology claims, to save over €100,000 million per carrier. Yes, that’s per carrier and it is an astronomical sum in any industry but for the airline industry that faced bankruptcy some years back after the cataclysmic events of 9/11, even more so.

Secondly, Jason Steffen who is an astrophysicist by trade published his findings in The Journal of Air Transport Management in 2008. Here we are in 2011, close to 2012 actually, a full four years later and not a dickie bird or a tweet from the carriers on their impending adoption of this cost saving and hugely transformative on-boarding methodology.

Thirdly, over the course of my business life I’ve sat in hundreds of planes waiting patiently for fellow passengers to unload and decamp and make way for a steadily building queue of passengers whose access is blocked. Steffen looked at this problem one day when he too was sitting patiently on a plane and saw what billions of others didn’t – the Monte Carlo Method.

According to Hornyak, some guys over at the online video show called This V That decided to use a mock 757 fuselage section on a sound stage with 72 mock passengers to try five boarding methods. The video shows that the ‘Steffen method” of on-boarding can reduce overall time by about half.

Of course, probably like you, I was intrigued as to why is it called the Monte Carlo method?  Dates back to the 1940s when John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Nicholas Metropolis were working on the infamous Manhattan nuclear weapon project.  Ulam’s uncle it seems was fond of gambling his money at, you guessed it, the Monte Carlo Casino.

Food for thought and a story that draws many parallels in the world of automated documentation.