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MasterCard wants to automate the business-to-business purchasing-payment process, which is largely based on manually processed paper purchase orders, invoices, and checks. The annual cost of doing it that way at the average billion-dollar-corporation: $30 million.

So the credit-card company has unrolled MasterCard e-P3, a new B-to-B payment program that integrates its existing purchasing card program--which is now used only for small-ticket purchases, not for large transactions--with electronic invoicing programs. Buyers install an e-P3 adapter in their back-end accounts-payable and purchasing systems. They can then post purchase orders on a closed Internet site. Suppliers can respond by either automatically reformatting the electronic order into an invoice, fill in a standard invoice offered by MasterCard, or upload a file of any format from their back-end systems. Business rules allow the MasterCard system to bounce back any unsatisfactory invoices to the supplier before even passing them to the buyer.

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