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.

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