Happy Customers and Employees

Companies, now more than ever, must focus on their most valuable assets: their employees. Automation is often thought of as something that “replaces” workers, when in reality, it can be used to:

• Eliminate manual tasks
• Empower your team with analytics
• Nurture collaboration with digital tools

Furthermore, expectations of excellent customer service are now the norm. They can be the make-or-break factor that determines whether a company thrives or dives. Speed, personal connection and digital competency are no longer hoped for when making purchasing decisions, they’re quite simply expected.

Givaudan, a worldwide provider of flavouring, scent, and health and beauty products, looking for ways to apply automation to various manual aspects of business operations while allowing for scalability and utilisation of their valued human resources.

Givaudan realised to scale up their business they needed to implement the following

• Create more strategic, fulfilling work for staff
• Reduce manual scanning & redundant data entry by automating manual tasks
• Eliminate human errors & inefficiencies with automated processing
• Improve customer satisfaction

Marton Nagy, Global Solution Expert Procure-to-Pay at Givaudan said, “Our goal for automation is not to make our people redundant, but to make them more valuable. We need our employees to be creative, to think, to make sure we go further than where we are today. Automating the tedious, repetitive tasks lets them use their time for more valuable purposes.”

The Solution

Just as in their business, specialising in complimentary scents to produce the best fragrances, they needed a complimentary solution to their already installed Esker Order Management solution. They chose Esker’s Accounts Payable (AP) solution to realise their vision.
Esker’s AP solution was implemented to eliminate the manual scanning and digitising of invoices, as well as capturing and recording payments, thereby increasing both speed and accuracy. It was implemented quickly thanks to Esker’s use of Agile methodology, and seamlessly integrated with Givaudan’s single instance global SAP system.

“We selected Esker’s Accounts Payable solution because of the trusted working relationship Esker had with the demand-to-cash team,” said Marton Nagy, Global Solution Expert Procure-to-Pay at Givaudan. “Esker has been delivering on its promise ever since.”

Part of Givaudan’s strategy for automating order entry and AP included making interaction with the solution simple for both customers and vendors. B2B customers place orders and send invoices in a variety of ways. With Esker, Givaudan has a flexible order processing solution that can adapt to the different ways B2B companies communicate without requiring complex integrations to accommodate Givaudan’s internal systems and data formats. Alessandra Mello, Global Head of Customer Care and Demand Planning at Givaudan, said, “We considered using EDI connections, but we found this quite limiting, as few customers are willing to invest the time, money, and resources to implement it,” said Mello. “Esker solutions don’t require our customers to build complex integrations to send us orders or invoices.”

Givaudan can now teach the solution (using Eskers Artificial Intelligence) the invoice formats its vendors use, allowing it to automatically and accurately enter invoices into the system. It also eliminates tedious entry of additional data to meet the invoice processing and tracking requirements in different countries — critical for a global company like Givaudan.
As a result, the AP staff has more time to concentrate on issues that truly require its skill and talent to investigate and resolve.

Vincent Depuis, IT Project Manager at Givaudan, said, “Our Esker journey started with automating sales order entry, and we’re seeing similar efficiency gains with the new AP solution. Our people can now focus their talents on what they do best, instead of tedious manual processes. Givaudan’s 2025 vision will feature even more ways to automate repetitive, manual tasks to add even greater value. Esker solutions will figure prominently in that plan.”

If you would like to learn more about Esker’s Accounts Payable solution, please get in touch, and I’d be happy to provide you with further information or a demo.

Susan Fletcher

Susan is an Internal Sales Consultant for Esker UK. She has been part of the Esker family since 2022.

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