Esker DeliveryWare

COMPANY OVERVIEW
With 24 years of field experience, Esker is no newcomer to document process automation. Headquartered in France, Esker has a worldwide presence with more than 80,000 customers and more than 2.5 million people using various products and services that help automate document-intensive processes. The company merged with several other companies in the United States in 2000 to round out its document process automation offerings, and the results are a platform of products that connect a company’s existing systems and move documents through processes in an efficient and cost-effective way. Esker’s products work particularly well within enterprises that have Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) systems such as SAP or Oracle E-Business Suite, helping them to eliminate resource-intensive order-to-cash or procure-to-pay processes that involve printing orders or invoices, walking them to another point and re-keying the data. Esker DeliveryWare is a solution that can automate a wide range of document-based processes such as accounts payable, sales order processing, purchasing and customer invoicing. The product works best in enterprises that have a significant volume of document handling tasks that can benefit from automation.

COMPANY STRATEGY
– Focus on providing products that automate labor-intensive workflows as well as reducing the integration challenges between internal systems and external sources.
– Offer customers measurable ROI with the potential for up to 70% reduction in order and invoice processing costs.
– Work closely with ERP system vendors (including SAP) to provide customers with value-added products that leverage installed ERP systems.
– Offer customers a variety of delivery models, including SaaS and on-premise solutions to complement customers’ existing IT infrastructure.
– Target manufacturing sector with many document-intensive processes and a high amount of ERP system usage.

IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY Esker DeliveryWare offers customers several options for implementation. For those companies that desire an on-premise solution, DeliveryWare can be implemented within existing IT infrastructure. Depending on the complexity of the implementation, customers are able to go live in as short as one or two days, up to 8 weeks, while costs can range from less than $20,000 to over $100,000.

For those companies that want to reduce the burden on IT resources and minimize capital expenditures, especially in light of the current economic conditions, Esker offers a software-as-a-service model for DeliveryWare that provides a flexible pay-as-you-go model and low implementation costs. Hosted data centers have the highest levels of availability, reliability, security, and disaster recovery to provide enterprises with a turnkey solution for document process automation.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
– Raise visibility of Esker and DeliveryWare in North America to build document process automation market share.
– Increase partnerships and alignment with other ERP vendors and also Document Management vendors to create complimentary sell to installed bases.
– Define and communicate value of solution, even though it cuts across traditional market segments or product categories.

UPSIDE ANALYSIS
Despite the automation that enterprise resource planning systems provide, there are still gaps in coverage, especially when the processes go beyond the corporate walls. This is often a pain point for organization, because they must meld manual processes with automation, and the results can be resource-intensive, error-prone, and inefficient. For example, taking an order from inside an ERP system, printing it out, walking it across to another system, and re-keying the data is not an optimal environment for business operations, and yet it is often the reality in many companies.

Esker’s DeliveryWare solution is part of a category of tools that seek to remedy the situation highlighted above. Document process automation is an important part of increasing efficiency and effectiveness with processes throughout the enterprise. Despite the economic downturn, document process automation provides a bright spot because organizations see immediate cost-savings and bottom-line impact from implementing such a solution. Esker has the advantage of offering on-premise or on-demand services, enabling an even lower initial investment to start gaining efficiency and reducing costs and errors associated with manual document routing and processing.

Esker has carved out a specific niche in the broader BPM space, and as a result has a very focused, highly successful business model. Upside Research recommends that Esker continue to expand its alignment with the leading ERP vendors, tighten integration to their solutions, and build its brand awareness outside Europe to capture more market share.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS
PRODUCT OVERVIEW

Esker DeliveryWare is a comprehensive solution for automating document processing throughout and beyond the walls of the enterprise. It replaces costly manual and error-prone steps in common procure-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles by automating document routing and reducing document handling times. DeliveryWare allows enterprises to capture, customize, transform, route and deliver data and documents from any source to any destination. The solution’s centralized management enables streamlined electronic business communications and facilitates faster payment cycles, increased visibility into order processes.

Upside Take
The area of document process automation is a subset of Business Process Management, and it has the benefit of a very clearly defined return on investment for organizations. Enterprises that have high volumes of paper- and document-centric tasks around sales ordering and payment are well aware of the pain points of their non-automated processes. Therefore, offering a solution to these problems with a clear ROI and several delivery options is a key to success. Esker has done a remarkable job aligning itself with one of the leaders in ERP to offer customers a complementary solution to the ERP systems that run their businesses. The key for Esker will be to raise its visibility and extend its interoperability with other ERP vendors to appeal to a wider swath of customers.

VENDOR DATA
Esker Inc.
U.S. headquarters
1212 Deming Way
Suite 350
Madison, WI 53717 www.esker.com
Phone: 800.368.5283
Email: info@esker.com
Founded: 1984
Ownership: Public
Employees: 240
Employees in R&D: 25%
Total Company Revenue: 26.6 million Euros (2008)
Industry Segment:
Process Automation
Key Partners:
– SAP
– Microsoft
Reference Accounts:
– Whirlpool
– Kimball International
– Pentair Water
Product: DeliveryWare
Number of Installations: 80,000 customers worldwide, with more than 2.5 million users.

Download the complete Esker DeliveryWare Upside Research Product Brief.

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