Organisations want the delivery of automation solutions to be as fast and efficient as possible. Inside SAP spoke to Eric Bussy, vice president product development, Esker, and Christophe DuMonet, managing director, Esker Australia and New Zealand, about the company’s efforts to make this a reality.
ISAP: What have Esker’s development priorities been over the last few years and how have you have been evolving the solutions that you provide to customers?
Eric Bussy: What we are doing is working to get the paper out of the equation in the cash conversion cycle – whether it’s accounts payable, sales order processing, or procurement. Historically we looked at the outbound part of the cash conversion cycle – accounts receivable, sending invoices and transaction documents. We then built up the inbound side – getting those emailed documents and invoices, and sales order management.
It was also clear to us that if we could come up with a business process automation solution that could be in the cloud and implemented faster, making it simpler and more accessible, it would give us the opportunity to reach more companies. For the past seven years, we have been constantly working on simplifying the implementation of a solution, enriching the functionality, going further in the business processes and helping companies to make their life easier and get more productivity out of their day-to-day tasks. We are growing at around 12 per cent a year, and getting interest across big customers and medium customers.
ISAP: Globally, what are the key challenges your customers are facing, and are they different in the Australian context?
EB: We feel companies of any size have a willingness to gain productivity and bring more value to customers, and they are investing for that. When we design a product, we want to get the time between deciding to improve a process and gaining the benefits to be very short. It makes the decision at a higher level must easier to act on.
Christophe DuMonet: It might take them a year and a half to two years to evaluate different solutions, to build a business case and eventually get approval. Once they get to that point they want it yesterday, because they want to have the benefits as quickly as possible.
EB: In the way we implement the solutions we always try to show them the benefits right away, instead of waiting months before you get that.
Another trend globally is business process managers leveraging the knowledge in how they automate one division to share the methodology amongst other divisions. Those business process optimisers are reporting to C-level people within the organisation, and make sure everything is managed the same way within the organisation trying to gain from any opportunity that might happen in one country to another one.
CD: In Australia, we see some consolidation of everything around ERP, including document management systems. Over the last 5-6 years, companies have accelerated the consolidation of ERP, document automation systems, and the standardisation of many back office processes. So on one hand we helped drive this and on the other hand we have benefited from that.
ISAP: What does that consolidation trend mean for you from a solution perspective?
EB: You either reside inside the ERP, and you are living in a limited space which can be difficult to operate in, or you make the choice to be outside of ERP. It’s the choice we’ve made, and that helps us in many ways to help our customers who sometimes have SAP but might have JDE or Oracle, and still want to consolidate the way they process documents. By having dedicated integration with all the ‘flavours’ of ERP, we work to really help them solve the problem and standardise the way they can manage risk. We’re offering them the same standard user interface, so it’s a way to gain productivity. That’s the way we work on the product – we gain insight from each implementation and make it as standard in the product, so it’s like a library of business processes that you can select, whether you are a mid-size company or you are operating across five different countries.
ISAP: How receptive are your customers to the idea of moving to an on-demand or cloud solution?
EB: There are some specific industries that where basically cloud is probably not appropriate for them, or they are not yet mature for that. I think it’s becoming more clear these days what you can get from the cloud, and when it comes to showing them the big picture of what they’re going to gain – shrinking down implementation time, getting to value right away, benefiting from a fully scalable model, and having a system that will bring them new features almost transparently – this brings value. We make sure that customers do see where we are going, and what they are going to get on a quarterly basis. We want to give companies all the tools necessary to go beyond what we initially sold them, and that’s the main goal we are working on right now – giving our customers the power in designing, enriching, and improving their process almost by themselves.
ISAP: Across the document process automation suite, where are you seeing the strongest demand?
CD: In the Australian context, we are seeing a new focus on sales order processing (SOP), with the market responding strongly to our solutions. They want to optimise their process which often leads to automation, they need to get in more productivity, they need to gain more visibility about those orders. They need to communicate to all the different stakeholders. We see a lot of companies just doing the basics which is inbound communication, there is limited communication back, and we are addressing that with a portal which is a big differentiator.
Accounts payable (AP) is more mature, but we are seeing more and more companies, certainly the multinationals that operate in Australia, move from local AP to shared services either here or in Asia. On the other hand customer care centres, which are a front office activity, are critical in their relationship with their customers and most remain local in Australia.
EB: The big trend we are seeing among customers globally is doing SOP, going with AP and implementing accounts receivables. Once they start to automate a process, they see the benefits and they have visibility over what’s happening, and they tend to move to another one. It’s the same consolidation phenomenon at a transactional level.
ISAP: What are your plans for the integration of your platform with the SAP Business ByDesign solution?
EB: We were approached by the SAP solution design team almost two years ago, so we have had the opportunity to work closely with product managers on the integration of SAP Business ByDesign and Mail On-demand. More than 50 per cent of our customers worldwide are SAP customers. We have been highly integrated in the manufacturing world and medical device world, and all those companies are with SAP, so it was natural when they came on the cloud side, we would make the step with them. All the cash conversion cycle will be then made available fully integrated with SAP Business ByDesign.
ISAP: What do you think will be the dominant trends in document process automation over the next five years?
EB: There are two main trends I see. One that is happening now is giving customers control of their document process strategy. We have professional services experts in order to help them configure the solution. We are now building the cloud solutions that our customers will be able to configure themselves like salesforce.com. We will be providing that to the customers, by making the interface even easier, with richer functionality.
Another big trend is business networks. On one end, we are sending millions of accounts receivable customer invoices. On the other end, we are also receiving customer invoices that we are scanning and injecting back into an ERP. So the next step is to hook up all those transactional business documents into a business network. There is an entire ecosystem we can build up around that – it’s definitely the way to grow, and we already do manage several millions of customers that we could hook together. So that’s one of the angles we are working on right now.
