department and they wouldn't agree to it. As all the systems absolutely relied on being able to do the end-to-end process on-line, this negated much of the advantage of being able to easily match payments to invoices, a process carried out manually by a large number of people. Despite that, as they were a very big company, suppliers were keen to get the business and the two shortlisted ones offered very good deals for a pilot using their system (or, to be precise, half their system). But the manager simply couldn't bring himself to make a decision to sign off the cost of the pilot, which was in the low 5 figures and represented minimal risk to the company. At that point, I threw my hands up in horror and left to set up on my own. I could tell numerous stories of this type about managers who should be able to see these things and either can't or don't want to. I am happily retired now and can look back on a golden era when I worked for a company that was run by engineers, that was cheap, productive, did everything in house and therefore costs were under our control. That worked nicely I would say until about the late eighties/very early ninties. At that point we started importing ideas from the States. Our new chief exec at the time decided we needed Arthur anderson's in to tell us how we should be doing our jobs. So started the