It was a crisp Tuesday morning in late October when Clara Wei, a forensic accountant with a quiet reputation for finding needles in digital haystacks, received the email that would dismantle a phantom.
: Contributed approximately £5.6 billion to the UK's GDP.
Historically, Airbus UK utilized Tungsten Network (formerly OB10) as its primary e-invoicing gateway. Tungsten acts as the "pipe" through which ePay data flows. When you submit an invoice via Tungsten in the required format (typically PEPPOL or EDI), it is ingested directly into Airbus’s SAP system. This triggers the automatic matching process.
To understand the scale of the ePay system, one must appreciate the scale of Airbus in the UK. Airbus is the largest commercial aerospace company in Britain, contributing billions to the economy and supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs indirectly through its supply chain.
That evening, Clara filed her report. It was titled:
When suppliers refer to "ePay Airbus UK," they are generally not talking about a single piece of software but a suite of integrated financial tools managed by Airbus’s Shared Service Center. In the UK, this primarily revolves around two concepts: and Supplier Self-Service (S3P) portals.