I’m sure we can all agree that to some extent, the last couple of years have put a strain on all of us. Although we at Esker have not been hit anything like as hard as some other businesses, for which we are very grateful, we have not been immune: working from home means that we have missed the camaraderie of the office, and we all have friends and families who have suffered. With rising prices for fuel and other necessities and ongoing climate issues, things may not begin to get easier as fast as we may like. However, there are ways in which we can help make these current challenges more bearable and improve our wellbeing.

I’ve previously written about how Esker makes it easy to transition to working from home, but that is only the logistics – the physical and mental wellbeing of employees is of vital importance too. Some of this, of course, is down to the employee. For example, I find that getting up and dressed on days when I am working from home just as I would when travelling to the office, gives me some structure to my day and helps separate the ‘work mode’ me from the ‘lounging at home’ me. Other people may go for a walk or bike ride instead of commuting.

It’s become clear, though, that the employer bears some responsibility too. Here at Esker, we have set up a Wellbeing Team, of which I am a member, to co-ordinate activities to promote wellbeing. Not the compulsory team-building events of old, though: activities are entirely voluntary and are suggested and organised by Esker employees themselves – the Team’s job is to ensure that activities are spaced out throughout the year.

Although things have been disrupted by the winter mini-lockdown, so far we have had lunchtime ‘Come Dine with Me’ style events where the members of a department get together to make lunch for those in the office; lunchtime walks around Esker’s office in Spondon and Allestree Park (which is close to home for some employees); boardgames at lunch and chats over Teams. Future events will hopefully include go-karting and the rescheduling of our Christmas Party, which we haven’t been able to organise for two years!

More formally, one of our First Aiders has expanded her role to include mental health, so that employees have someone to go to if they have issues – both as someone to talk to, and to help them get assistance from outside agencies, including those provided as part of the employee benefits package.

At Esker we have a shared philosophy. Our Wellbeing Team is helping to promote Good Vibes Only. A positive work environment promotes better performance. We make sure everyone finds the right balance by respecting individual needs. Find out more here.

Mark Johnson

Mark is a Professional Services Engineer at Esker UK. He has been part of the Esker family since 2018.

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Not that I’ve been there much. As I write, England is still in lockdown. This means that only those whose presence is essential are allowed to travel to work, with everyone else expected to work from home.

Luckily for me, this has been relatively pain-free. Recently I was speaking to my friend who works as an IT consultant for one of the UK’s largest house developers. He told tales of roomfuls of laptops being provisioned as the company hurriedly prepared for its staff to work from home during the first lockdown in March. Luckily, the standard issue PC for Esker staff is a smart Dell laptop. I also have a dock, so it is easy to connect my laptop to the twin monitors I have at home. The Esker IT boffins have set up a solid VPN for us employees to use, so there is nothing I need to visit the office for. I’ve even got an app to allow calls to my work phone extension to be routed to my headset.

It’s not all beer and skittles, though. My desk is in the front room of my Victorian terraced home, so noise from the street can be distracting. And I do miss the camaraderie of the Esker UK office – the occasional Teams meeting isn’t quite the same.

Esker has also equipped many other businesses with the necessary tools for remote working, which has proved essential to many organisations over recent months, enabling efficiency within procure-to-pay (P2P) and order-to-cash (O2C) processes as well as communication with customers and suppliers.

SECURITY

Esker’s Business Continuity and Security teams have well-established support plans in place to give our customers peace of mind. These include:

• Cloud-based platform with 24/7 availability that’s not location dependent, enabling support to all customers and partners from remote environments
• 2 independent operational centres in different locations to continually monitor the operational continuity of Esker’s platform
• Customer support sites in 3 countries, allowing us to maintain global coverage
• Esker Services availability to continue to support and deliver services to all of our customers

P2P

Esker’s P2P platform enables finance departments to remotely continue to approve invoices, effectively manage cash and maintain positive relationships with suppliers. P2P users have access to a supplier portal that enhances supplier/buyer collaboration and supply chain performance, and the Esker Anywhere mobile app allows users to carry out the following actions even while working remotely:

• Track statuses of purchase requisitions & expense reports
• Approve, hold or send invoices back to previous approver
• Monitor KPIs from a customisable dashboard

O2C

Esker’s O2C solution plays a vital role enabling businesses to continue managing all customer interactions in a single platform: the right orders still need to get to the right customer at the right time, and cash collection cannot cease simply because operations are now remote. This is achieved through:

• Esker Anywhere Mobile App which allows users to monitor KPIs & place/track orders from the palm of their hand
• Self-service customer portal which enables customers to place orders, resolve disputes, etc. anytime, anywhere
• End-to-end connectivity between all applications, enabling collectors, customer service & AR managers to perform critical tasks in real time & without delays

MAIL

Esker Mail Services allows organisations to send out large batches of customer invoices and other time-sensitive documents. With the touch of a button and 100% compatibility, documents can be mailed directly from the cloud, from wherever or whenever you’re working — saving time, money and peace of mind.

You can find out more at https://www.esker.co.uk/mobile-business-empowerment/

Mark Johnson

Mark is a Professional Services Engineer at Esker UK. He has been part of the Esker family since 2018.

Read more insights from Mark Johnson

Both cities have histories dating back to Roman times, but it is Lyon’s Roman district which forms part of the Historic Site of Lyon. Other areas of the Historic Site include Fourvière, the Renaissance district (Vieux Lyon), the silk district on the slopes of Croix-Rousse, and the Presqu’île. Vieux Lyon and Croix-Rousse are both known for their traboules, or narrow passageways, the first examples of which were thought to have been built in the 4th century. These allow the Lyonnais to get from their homes to the River Saône and the canuts, or silk workers, to get from their workshops to the textile merchants at the foot of the hill. The canuts were subject to extremely poor working conditions, and so staged many revolts which are considered among the very first worker uprisings. The second of which, in February 1834, lasted 6 days before being supressed by 12,000 soldiers.

Silk, too, is a link between Lyon and Derby. In 1716, John Lombe visited Piedmont in Italy and came back to Derby with the necessary knowledge (and some Italians) to build a mill on the west bank of the River Derwent. This mill, completed in 1721, is considered to be the first fully mechanised factory in the world, and cements Derby’s claim to be one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. The Silk Mill, as it is known today, was converted to a museum in the 1970s and forms part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site – a collection of paper, cotton and silk mills and their communities built by Lombe, Richard Arkwright and others that pioneered the use of water power on such a large scale and provided the blueprint for factory production. Interestingly, the first cotton mill on the European mainland – based upon Arkwright’s mill in Cromford – was built in Ratingen, Germany, the hometown of Esker EDI Services. It too is now a museum.

Esker are pioneers in the use of the cloud and AI technology to streamline business processes in today’s Digital Revolution. Though we continue to look forward, it’s fascinating to look back at where we’re from and the revolutions of the past.

Mark Johnson

Mark is a Professional Services Engineer at Esker UK. He has been part of the Esker family since 2018.

Read more insights from Mark Johnson

• How we can maximise the customer experience through Professional Services
• What we do particularly well, and where we can improve
• How we can work better as a team
• How we can work with other departments within the business to ensure customer expectations are being managed and met
• How we can better use the latest, industry leading toolset made available to us to enhance our work throughput overall

Part of the day was also taken up with remote meetings with our colleagues from our HQ in Lyon to learn about new aspects of the latest release of our Esker on Demand solutions.

As the meeting lasted all day, we needed a little downtime over lunch, and we wouldn’t be developers without pizza! Innovation is all very well, but there’s always room for tradition (and a slice of ‘Meat Feast’…or the traditional ‘Margarita’).

Mark Johnson

Mark is a Professional Services Engineer at Esker UK. He has been part of the Esker family since 2018.

Read more insights from Mark Johnson

As part of the Esker ‘One Team Beyond Boundaries’ philosophy, recently I visited the Esker Head office in the beautiful French city of Lyon for training. Here I met Esker colleagues mainly from France, but also Spain, and sampled French cuisine.

As a gift for teacher, so to speak, I took a box of much loved British sweets from a manufacturer not far from Esker’s UK here in Derby. I wonder what they made of the Parma Violets…

Mark Johnson

Mark is a Professional Services Engineer at Esker UK. He has been part of the Esker family since 2018.

Read more insights from Mark Johnson