Esker’s Professional Services Manager, Rob Cooper, talks about the role of the Professional Services team throughout the customer journey; from pre-sales, through implementation, to go-live and support.

A discussion between Esker’s Head of Marketing, Sam Townsend (ST), and Esker’s Professional Services Manager, Rob Cooper (RC).

This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.

ST
Hi everyone, my name is Sam Townsend and I am Head of Marketing for Esker Northern Europe. Thanks for joining us for another Esker On Air podcast. In today’s session we are going to be speaking to Esker’s Professional Services Manager, Rob Cooper, to discuss the importance that Professional Services brings to an organisation such as Esker. So, at this point I would like to welcome Rob and let him introduce himself. Hi Rob, tell us a little bit about how you became involved with Professional Services and your past experience and current role.

RC
Hi! Well as Sam said my name is Rob Cooper. I have been with Esker, if you believe my LinkedIn profile, for 6 years and 11 months, to be really precise. I joined Esker all those years ago because I was looking for a new challenge and wanting to have something that was a bit more local, having worked for an Australian company previously. So, I joined the Esker Team and find myself in this position now because my boss at the time, Wynne, retired last year, and I was fortunate enough to be able to take on his role as the Professional Services Manager here at Esker UK. So, that’s how I find myself at Esker and in my current role.

ST
Excellent. Thanks for that introduction Rob. So, I guess a good place to start for those who are possibly unsure about exactly what Professional Services are or PS for short, as we like to say, and what that entails, can you explain what the services are and how they fit into the business?

RC
Sure! Professional Services is an unusual name, and does not really ring true for many businesses. They don’t really know what it is. We are there for the journey from what we call pre-sales; so before you have signed a contract to join the Esker family. We are there to help from that phase, understanding the solution, how it might fit within the business, through to installing the application, getting it integrated to your ERP, helping you through testing and integration and how that works with your business, helping you through training, testing and go-live of the project. We do not just disappear at the end of go-live because we will hand you over to the Esker Support Team for ongoing support issues. We are there for helping with those support issues if we need to be, if it’s very technical and we’re needed there. We are also there for any change requests that people may want to have. Whether that is as simple as adding a few fields onto a form or maybe it is a little more complicated, and we’re looking at creating a brand new process or we are looking at amending the workflow engines, if you are talking about the Procure-to-Pay application. We get involved in the full life cycle of the project from cradle to grave.

ST
Fantastic. Great explanation! So, now we’ve got a good overview of PS, let’s dive in a little more into the detail. Could you explain a little bit more about the onboarding process and the customer journey throughout a project implementation, and perhaps beyond?

RC
Yes. You will have probably engaged with somebody from the Professional Services team during the pre-sales process, but that is not full engagement; you are not going to hear from us all the time. Once you have agreed to join, there will be a contract in place; that is the point that the Sales Team starts to hand the project over to the PS Team and we get that notification. The first thing that you would get, is an e-mail from myself welcoming you to the project, and providing you with some documentation to go away and read. It also gives you the ability to sign up to some of the other services that we have, from Esker All Access through to Documentation and things like that. That is the first thing you would see at the start of a project. Then we start to engage with you and arrange some meetings. The first one would be a kick off call to introduce everyone to each other and make sure that we’ve understood the scope of the project, and also discuss resources and timelines for the project as well. We would love to get the project in as soon as possible, but we have to accommodate things like, well, simple things like vacations. Maybe, we have got a crucial resource on either side that has some vacation planned and that maybe changes the time line. It could be that if we are talking to an Accounts Payable team, maybe they have a month-end or year-end coming up that maybe adjust the time lines. So, those sorts of things we talk about in our kick-off meeting, to make sure everyone is happy and understands what we’re going to go away and do. This is when the project is really starting to gather pace, and then we look at getting fully engaged with the project through our integration and testing of the solution before going into training. That is really the on-boarding process of a project into the Professional Services team.

ST
Fantastic! Yes, that’s really interesting to know that! It’s great to understand how that fits into the customer journey. I presume it’s not always straightforward though and plain sailing? What kinds of challenges do you encounter with certain projects, and how are these overcome?

RC
Yes, there’s always a challenge within every project. Some of them are really big, and some of them are much smaller. We’d much prefer the smaller ones, as would our customers! Typically, the challenges that we see on the onboarding are around integration. It is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. We have seen integration take a weekend, and we have seen it take many, many months. We are here to help the customer through the process of integrating. Sometimes it is a challenge; maybe because, actually producing the files for integration is not easy for the business. Maybe they produce it and all of a sudden they start to notice that the data they’ve got is not perhaps the cleanest and they need to go away and have a mini project and clean up the data. Definitely those are the sorts of challenges that we see at the beginning of a project, and often these are the sorts of things that make timelines longer than desired. We have to go through the integration phase, because if we take an Order Management project, we need to have customer data and have material or item data to be able to process those orders. Without that we are going to struggle to process the documents, so getting that data is key. We don’t really want to progress until we’ve got that, because we are not going to be able to do things like our testing, we’re not going to be able to train you on our solution, because, we’ve got Esker data, but that is not your data. Sometimes there is a challenge there, to visualise what is going on and if it is not customers, the vendors, the items that you are expecting to see. So integration is a big, big piece of work.

ST
Right, I understand that, I guess from that point of view with the challenges, and as larger multi-national contracts are signed, you are probably going to get more challenges. Are integration partners ever used to help to facilitate the process at all?

RC
Yes. We can tackle integration partners from two points of view. It is brilliant if customers have an integration partner onboard already, and we find many customers do, because they have somebody who maybe looks after their ERP for them, and they can take on the role of integration partner. We do come across customers who don’t have that. They have had their ERP for a number of years and it has been in a happy state, so we can reach out to integration partners. We have ERP knowledge; we have as we like to call them ERP evangelists in the business, who can help and talk about a few bits and pieces, but when it comes to proper and true partners, we do have connections in the outside world who can come in and help and advise on those integration steps to make it a connected system.

ST
Ok. Perfect. That’s great. So, I guess coming on to the future, and what does that hold for the development of PS to better assist the customer through the customer journey; I guess like growing teams and that sort of thing?

RC
Yes, so the journey of PS; I go back nearly 7 years and look at what I did when I first started. I did the full pre-sales piece, joining lots of calls with potential customers to understand what they were looking for and things like that. I would go away and do the training as well, and that was great, to go out and see the customer and help them with their training and understanding of the application. And then we used to do the post project piece, where we used to help customers a lot. As the business has grown, and as PS has grown, we have identified that you can’t wear all of those different hats. It’s a big task to handle all of those. So, we now look at what we are doing. We have dedicated resources now around pre-sales. The team and the consultants do a little less pre-sales and are now focussed on the projects.

ST
So they get more time allocated to the projects.

RC
Yes. Training; we now have dedicated resources within the office around training, so that they can talk the business language, they understand how the application works, if there have been changes made they understand how they work within the project. We have dedicated resource there, which means that the consultants are doing a little less training but are more focussed on the consultancy piece. And the last part that I’ve touched on, the post project piece, we have the Customer Experience Team now as well, who are there to help people utilise the system as much as much as possible. So, once again, it is a little less on the PS Team to go away and do. That is the journey that we have been through. That is 7 years worth of journey in a couple of seconds. We have also changed the structure of the PS Team as well. So, we used to do all applications, which is great, you get to know them, and being slightly more old-school, I can go away and do all these applications. However, as the applications have matured they have become bigger, more complex and a little more difficult to understand. Trying to do all of that at the same time is a big ask of anybody. So, we now try and focus functionally on the applications so that we have people who really understand the Procure-to-Pay world and people who really understand the Order-to-Cash world as well. So, we have got people who really understand the applications and modules in far more detail than trying to spread your knowledge widely.

ST
Do you draw on resources from Esker Corporate as well. Is that something you do?

RC
Yes, we have access to what we call the International Professional Services Team – IPS. We can reach out to those guys as well, and we can reach out to the Support Team; there is no reason why we can’t do that. Through those two groups of people we can access the R&D teams as well. So, if we have an incredibly complex problem and is not easily solvable through the tools that we have available to us we can reach out to those guys as well, to get advice and guidance from them. That nicely touches on the structure of these teams as well. We have talked about consultants, and they understand how the application works. They understand how to marry these applications to the business. We have talked about change requests; we have got engineers who can, in the background, do the coding, the additional fields and things like that. They can go away and do the behind the scenes stuff to make the application more customer specific, if that is what is needed. We have changed a lot in nearly seven years, from doing everything, to being more focussed on the particular tasks that are presented to us as a team.

ST
Fantastic. That is great. Superb! Thanks for that Rob. That was a whistle stop tour of PS, but it has been fascinating, really interesting to get that insight!

RC
It is an insight that maybe many people don’t get, even internally, maybe don’t get to see, and get to understand. We aren’t the IT people who sit in darkened rooms, and don’t talk to people. We are the opposite of that, we want to be talking to people and we want to be engaging with people. It is different to, perhaps, the traditional view of IT people.

ST
Yes, absolutely. I totally agree. It shows the importance of the role that PS plays in the wider context of the business. That was fantastic, and I appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us!

RC
Not a problem. Thanks very much for having me.

This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.

This podcast and previous episodes in the series can also be found on Spotify.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Offering a 360° view of supplier information, Esker’s automated platform spans the entire procure-to-pay process — equipping finance departments with AI and RPA technology and helping them effectively manage compliance, gain full process visibility and reduce staff workload.

Esker’s Credit Management Specialist, Martyn Brooke, talks about how Esker’s solutions can help organisations, particularly during the current economic climate.

A discussion between Esker’s Head of Marketing, Sam Townsend, and Esker’s Credit Management Specialist, Martyn Brooke.

This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.

ST: Hi everyone, my name is Sam Townsend, and I’m Head of Marketing for Esker Northern Europe. Thanks for joining us for another Esker on Air podcast. In this session, we’ll be speaking to Esker’s recently appointed Credit Management Specialist, Martyn Brooke, and we’ll be discussing the importance of managing credit within organisations, especially in today’s economic climate.
So, at this point I’d like to welcome Martyn, and let him introduce himself. Hi Martyn. Tell us a little about yourself and about your past experience, and how you got involved with credit management, and your current role at Esker.

MB: Hello, Sam. First of all, thanks for inviting me on here, always a pleasure! So, that’s a very good question, let’s talk about how I got into this many years ago! I actually started off initially in the procurement area, for a few years, when I left school. I fancied a change, so I went into a customer service role, back in the manual days, back in the ’80s. I probably spent two or three years in a customer service role, picking up the telephone, processing orders, taking orders, issuing credit notes, etc. So, it gave me a very good grounding for, one day, when I got a call from the credit manager at a company called Altas Cop Co, and he asked me to go and work for them as his assistant. From that day on, I’ve not looked back. I’ve spent the last 35 years, roughly, working in a credit control type environment; an order-to-cash environment. So I feel that the experience that I’ve got from that, really helped me in credit management, because now, when we talk about process improvement, we’re maybe talking about digitisation, I remember the good old manual days, so I know what it’s like, and I know how cumbersome it can be.

ST: Yes it must have been good to have that experience, to be at the coal face, and understanding all of those manual processes that were involved, and understanding, I suppose, the utopia of automating that whole process.

MB: Yes, and it’s interesting that I remember my desk used to be behind a row of filing cabinets, so I could barely see the window for filing cabinets! So, offices have changed now; I’m not sure I’ve seen a filing cabinet for a while, unless it’s got stationery in it! So, those days are gone, less mistakes are made now, there’s more validation of stuff, there’s more checks, there’s more audit, and so I can understand where it’s come from over the years, and how we’ve got there. I’ve done the journey! And here I am!

ST: Excellent, so were you involved in projects that involved automation?

MB: The answer is, not so much automation; I suppose I ought to continue the journey really. I went through a few companies, so I went from Atlas Cop Co to a German distribution company, and I then went on to work for HP. In fact I worked for a company called EDS who were taken over by HP. I then worked for a company called Rockwell Automation. So they were big American companies, very disciplined companies, very process orientated companies, and I think that this is where my process knowledge has come from, and where I became a process man. That’s moved me quite well into the digital world. I do understand the process that’s behind things, and how we can improve it. I’ve done lots of SAP and ERP implementations. I’ve been involved with lots of acquisitions, so I can understand how to integrate other companies, and subsidiaries, etc. into already existing systems and departments. So, I’ve gained a lot of experience over the years with that, and I think that’s put me in good shape for the automation world if I’m honest.

ST: And that sort of depth of knowledge for your current role at Esker; tell us a little bit about that.

MB: I ran my own business for a few years, and then I stumbled across Esker. I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t know much about Esker, in fact, I probably knew nothing about Esker when I first came across them. After discussions with the senior management there, they obviously realised, and I realised, that they didn’t have anyone in the organisation that had the operational credit management and order-to-cash experience. So, I was asked to come onboard, and I came on board as a consultant, working a few hours a month, and then a couple of days a month, and then three days a week, and now most recently I’m doing five days a week. And I’m a happy man! So that’s how I’ve ended up at Esker. So, what I do at Esker. When I first joined, it took a while to define the role, but I think now, it’s beginning to take shape. I do a lot of work with marketing, not that I’m a marketeer, but I do support them in terms of webinars, events, and getting the brand out there through my contacts and my network, the Institute of Credit Management, and other shared service forums. So, there’s lot of organisations out there that maybe Esker didn’t know about, or maybe they did know about and didn’t do anything about it, but we’re beginning to get the Esker name out there now, and I’m finding that people are coming to us rather than us pushing our name in their face, more people are now coming to us, which is proving that our marketing strategy is working.

ST: I think certainly on the side of AP, they are quite savvy on that side, in terms of knowing what’s out there for solutions, and helping them with challenges that they’ve got, but I think that it’s not always the case for accounts receivable, and credit, collections, and those sort of things. So, do you think that that’s changed over the years, and that understanding is better now?

MB: Oh most definitely, yes, Let’s go back in an operational role, maybe ten years ago, when I was doing it. I wish I’d had some of these solutions pushed in my face if I’m honest. It would have made my job, not 100% easier, but certainly 50% easier. Some of the things you think about, like visibility, auditability. I spent so much of my life with audit, and trying to produce evidence. Things like onboarding new customers; all of this type of stuff. I know that I may talk about the solutions in a bit more detail in a minute, but some of the big challenges I had were bringing on new customers, credit limit reviews, and being able to evidence that properly, and having that information in front of you, and store it. I think that is one thing that automation has given people, is a consistent process, and an auditable one, I’d say. And the visibility is absolutely brilliant in automation in my opinion.

ST: That’s excellent, and yes, we’ll come on to that a little bit later. So, thanks! A great introduction, and fascinating to understand your background, years of experience and the wealth of knowledge related to the success of managing credit. So, I touched upon it a little bit at the beginning, regarding the importance of managing credit within an organisation. We’ve heard about sometimes alarming figures, from various reports, such as those from Atradious , and you hear these figures, like 53% of total value of invoices reported are overdue, 10% of invoice values are written off, and there’s also likely to be projected increase, I think they are saying over 30%, in business insolvencies worldwide in 2022. So I guess, from your point of view, what are some of the actions an organisation can do through automating the credit management process to try and combat some of these challenges that organisations are faced with?

MB: So, before I go into the automation bit, I was actually lucky enough to listen to a few people yesterday, and I’d completely forgotten, over the last four or five years, some of the things that we’ve been through. We’ve been through some challenges and got through those challenges, and I’m sure we’ll continue to keep going through those challenges. Brexit was probably the first one. We weren’t sure of the impact of that, and we’re still not 100% sure what the impact is! And then we had the covid period come along; we had to deal with covid, and that was unprecedented. I don’t think anyone can take that away in terms of what knock on effects that has had on recruitment, retention of staff, ‘The Great Retirement’, where a lot of people who were at the end of their careers, and didn’t want to come back into it. We’ve had guys who should have already gone through university, haven’t gone through university, so they’ve now probably deferred that, and they’ve now decided to go into university, so we have a labour shortage. We have inflation that’s soaring, although, I saw yesterday that they reckon it’s come down slightly to about 9.9%. We’ve got supply chain issues, we have energy issues, we’ve got fuel prices. I sat in that room yesterday and I’d forgotten all of these things are challenges that are going to affect everyone. That’s it bluntly.

ST: Yes, it’s a perfect storm.

MB: Yes, they are the words I was probably looking for. So let’s just remind ourselves that we’ve got these challenges. Fraud is probably another one, and there are a lot of fraudulent claims, or have been a lot of fraudulent claims with the covid stuff. CBILS and that type of stuff. So again, it’s just going to be another challenge. And HMRC have got their own challenges of trying to retain and attract staff to actually collect this money, and the Treasury putting pressure on them.

ST: And it’s compliance and credit policies I guess; things like that?

MB: It’s all the way through, Sam, and I can’t sit here and list everything; I can’t remember everything! But there’s just a few things that I wanted to mention. Obviously, there’s the invasion of Ukraine, and that pushed prices of fuel and grain and things like this up. You talked about insolvencies there, and there will be an increase in insolvencies, because you think that the knock on effect of all this is going to be that, with the supply chain issues, with inflation, cost of materials going up, there are companies out there who can’t finish projects, they can’t then bill for projects, they can’t get their money in, and they also then can’t pay the staff, and you are going to get companies that are going into all sorts of voluntary arrangements, credit and voluntary arrangements, and insolvency. It’s going to be a real challenge. So, coming back to your question on automation, let me start by saying, visibility, as I said earlier on, is one of the things, across whatever you are doing, whether onboarding a customer, ongoing credit analysis of your customer, collecting money from that customer, applying the cash correctly from that customer; to me, everything has to have visibility to be able to make those quick decisions, and if you haven’t got that visibility, you don’t know where you are at any given time. So, to me, that’s one massive benefit! People often think it’s a cost benefit straight away, but no, it’s actually, for me, it’s doing more with less. So it’s not about how many FTEs can I cut, it’s not about that, it’s about, we’re a growing company, we want to grow, but obviously, we want to grow in the correct way, and obviously, we don’t want to keep have to onboarding people. I can understand that, because there’s a cost to that, there’s training, there’s everything else. So doing more with less, to me, with automation, I think is a huge benefit.

ST: So almost, visibility is, with the customer management side of it, the visibility sits in the middle and, like you were saying, it’s performance monitoring, and credit application; all those kinds of things, monitoring risk, you’ve got to have visibility over all of those different areas.

MB: Yes, you have, and then of course there’s going to be a fight to collect your money. As money dries up, which inevitably it will with high interest rates and insolvencies, and I don’t want to depress people, but it is something that we’ve got to face. I guess the speed that you can collect your money; that goes back to visibility. What is outstanding out there, it goes back to good onboarding, because you’ve got to get your customer master data correct, you are trading with companies that can afford to pay you. I could sit here all day and talk about the benefits of automation! The other thing is employee morale, because you are given good tools to work with, and nice products to work with, and therefore they are happier people!

ST: Yes, I was going to come on to that. Obviously, we always focus on the benefits within an organisation, and that’s excellent, that’s what we want to do. We turn the phrase positive-sum growth. It’s a phrase that means a win-win for not just internal wins, but also external, so customers and suppliers. So, it’s kind of sharing the value of those benefits. Have you seen that and how that works through automation?

MB: Well, again, self-serve isn’t it? I call it self-serve. And I’m not saying that it’s the more you can get your customers to do, it’s not about that either, I don’t want the customer to think, “I want a copy of the invoice, so I’ll just ring up ABC Ltd.”, it’s not about that, it’s about enabling your customers to get their invoices straight away, they can get copies, they can dispute in a portal, they can pay in a portal. So it’s that self-service, it goes far beyond saying, there’s your invoice; pay. It’s about communication, because the systems talk to each other. Just relying on email, to me, and sending an email out there, and hope you get a response at some point, we need to leave those days behind. I think it’s now using the most up-to-date technology, and I think that Esker’s solutions can help. That’s Collections, and we’ve got other good things like a good Claims and Deductions module, which at the moment is doing an absolutely fantastic job in the FMCG, it works really well for those types of suppliers.

ST: Tell us a little bit about that, Martyn.

MB: Well, I used to deal with it. Let’s be honest, you had big supermarkets, pub chains, DIY people; they used to do a lot of promotions.

ST: Is this things like end of shelf promotions and those sort of things that we see in the supermarket?

MB: Yes, and there would be, for example, a few cans of baked beans that were bent, or crooked, and the supermarket would deduct that from the supplier. Never mind that they might have dropped it at their end, they would issue either a debit note or a claim, and they send this nice long remittance back, and then you’ve got to handle that, so the poor supplier sees a remittance with possibly a thousand invoices on it, but then they see maybe 120 deductions at the other end that they’ve then got to manage, which is a shortage of money; they weren’t expecting it. So our Claims and Deductions tool is something that really is fantastic, because it links with the Cash Application module, it will then create that claim within the Claims and Deductions module, and it’s got an inbuilt workflow, an escalation path that you can pre-define based on the deduction, so we are saving customers so much time, in terms of spreadsheets. And again, I’ll go back to the employee morale bit, people don’t want to be sitting there just entering numbers into spreadsheets, and distributing spreadsheets all over the organisation.

ST: I’ve heard that term, because we’ve talked about ‘burn out’, but now this is ‘bore out’, or being bored, have you heard that term? So, people are suffering from ‘bore out’ now, instead of ‘burn out’. And that’s true, they are doing these monotonous manual tasks, and it’s taking their time away really from the real benefit to the organisation, and that’s dealing with customers and suppliers, and making sure that process is seamless and efficient.

MB: Yes, with respect, you’re going to lose good people if all they are doing is boring, repetitive tasks all day, so automation takes that away and allows them to do, as you say, more strategic tasks, and more process improvement. So, yes, I’m trying to keep the benefits of automation to, not really at a functionality level. I’m trying to keep it at a high benefit level. Hopefully that makes some sense anyway.

ST: Yes, absolutely, and I think, in terms of what you are saying, it does span the credit management side of it, it’s helping to facilitate the customer onboarding, credit approval process, and we talked about improving collaboration, visibilities. That’s that key thing that you mentioned that sort of encompasses everything. And just getting better control over that management as well, and lowering the risks.

MB: Absolutely!

ST: Reducing those write offs! And allowances for bad debts and keeping that down.

MB: I was speaking to a company the other day, and I just could not believe what a lot of manual processes they’ve got. This is a big organisation by the way, and I was speaking to the order-to-cash person, and she could not believe how much some of our tools could help her. She basically used the word, that she fell in love with a few of our solutions, and that is really nice to hear somebody say that, because this is why we have developed them, and this is why we believe they will be successful. But I think that people automatically think that automation is just a bottom line thing. It’s not just a bottom line thing, and there is so much more to it, which we’ve mentioned today, so I just want to make that doubly clear really.

ST: Yes, it’s good to hear those things, and myself as well on the marketing side, we hear that from our customers, and working with the customer experience department and it’s great to hear that feedback! We heard from a customer just the other week, and, you don’t like to blow your own trumpet, but when you hear these sort of things, it’s nice to get that feedback, and actually, her team had bought some flowers and put them on her desk, thanking her for having a solution that would automate that process, so it’s incredible to hear that!

MB: There you go, you see! A happy customer and a happy workforce! How about that?

ST: Well, thanks for your time, Martyn. That’s been fascinating, and sort of a short delve into it, and there’s lots more that we could go into but I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us!

MB: You’re welcome, Sam, a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

This discussion is also available as a podcast. Listen here.

This podcast and previous episodes in the series can also be found on Spotify.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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We asked Neil Palmer, Business Development Manager for Esker’s Procure-to-Pay solutions, about his 24 year career at Esker, how the solutions have developed over his time with the business, and what benefits can be realised by organisations that are using Esker’s P2P solutions.

A discussion between Esker’s Head of Marketing, Sam Townsend, and Business Development Manager for P2P, Neil Palmer.

This discussion is also available as a podcast . Listen here.

ST: Hello everyone, and thanks for joining us again for another of our Esker On Air podcasts. I’m Sam Townsend, Head of Marketing at Esker Northern Europe, and I’ll be your host for this session.
Today I’ll be speaking with Neil Palmer, one of Esker’s longest serving employees of almost 24 years’ experience.
So, let’s get started.
Firstly, welcome Neil, and thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to speak with me today.

NP: You are very welcome Sam, thank you, and good morning everybody, or hello everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here.

ST: Well Neil, having almost 24 years’ experience at Esker it’s certainly a great achievement, and definitely deserves some significant recognition. I’m sure that throughout this time you’ve seen a considerable amount of changes within Esker; the external marketplace, and personally, with where you are today as one of Esker’s senior business development managers for our procure-to-pay solutions.
I guess a good place to kick things off would be if you could explain where it all started for you working at Esker, and how this evolved for you over the years to where you are today in your current role.

NP: Yes no problem, well it’s absolutely, well it’s hilarious, actually. Only yesterday I was writing a LinkedIn post, and the first thing that I wrote on there was, “I had hair when I started!”, it’s been quite a journey! But it’s been a great journey. I’ve always considered it, it sounds quite cliché, but I’ve always considered Esker to be a family. It’s a great place to be, lovely people, and I’ve learned a lot over the years, but it has been a journey. I’ve done lots of different things throughout that time, and we’re going all the way back to 1998, so getting on for 24 years ago. I think that maths is right! I was a young lad of 19, and it was my second or third job after a failed attempt at kitchen fitting, and a little dabble with being a junior programmer. I got made redundant, and just speculatively wrote for a job at Esker. The old MD, Bashrat Din, he gave me an interview, I got on board with Wynne and his team in the Technical Department. So I started off back in 1998, my first role was actually answering the ‘phone, dealing with customers, and that’s always where my love has been; helping customers. We used to sell an emulation solution, so back in the day where you had a Windows PC on your desk and also a terminal; the software we sold effectively reduced the need for two machines on your desk, so it was an emulator that sat on Windows to allow you to talk to your mainframe system, that’s what we sold primarily, in fact we still do! There are still people that use that to this day. My position was to answer the ‘phone, when people had bought copies of the TUN Plus software, they got a serial number in the box, and they’d ‘phone me, and I’d give them the details of how to get the licence installed and working, and they could register their details. That gradually transitioned into a support role as well, taking first line support calls, and for the first few years that was pretty much what I did, and it was great. I made some great relationships with customers.

ST: Was that technical support then Neil, that you were doing?

NP: Yes absolutely, so taking any issues with the software, any connectivity problems, I’d just dive in there and try to help the customer to solve those problems, escalate anything to the senior guys if there were any particularly difficult ones, but most of that was interacting with customers, solving problems. I worked along-side Paul Scrivens-Smith who’s now moved on to our US Office, and he’s one of our other long-serving guys. So that happened for a while and I gradually moved towards internal systems, so I was also looking after printers, and installing new PCs. In fact I put in an old Sisco ‘phone system; I’ve tried my hands at a lot of things! This sounds like a job interview! And then also I did a little bit of professional services, so I went out to visit some customer sites, and I did some implementations of our solutions. So it was really nice because it was a very varied and diverse journey through technical solutions and visiting customers, so it’s always been changeable, there have always been lots of things that have kept it very interesting. And finally, back to 2009, 2010, I moved into the world of Sales! At the time I referred to that as the dark side, but it’s actually been a brilliant transition for me, and I think one of the main reasons behind that is that, is actually, as a sales person, to have the technical knowledge and the understanding of the solutions puts you in quite a good position. So it’s been really nice to serve customers and help them with the commercial side of things, but also with the technical; how does it work? So whilst I still need assistance from the pre-sales and technical guys, I’m quite self-sufficient most of the time to go and see customer, just on my own. Often you’ll get to a room of 10 people and they are like, “Who else is coming?” and I’ll say, “It’s just me! Here I am!”.

ST: So I guess where you are now, in your current role, you look after specifically procure-to-pay; solutions for procure-to-pay?

NP: That’s right.

ST: Could you tell us about that?

NP: So we’re split into teams here at Esker, so we have both the order-to-cash side and the procure-to-pay side. So I work on procure-to-pay, handling accounts payable, procurement, and all of the other parts of that solution such as expenses, supplier management, contract management, and it’s a really nice place to be. We’ve got a lot of very well known customers around the world. But it is a mixture of both helping customers to choose and buy their solutions, but also looking after existing customers and making sure things are working well for them. But it was a choice I made to go into P2P and I thought that it was an area that I, well, it just resonated with me, it’s a nice solution, there are a lot of benefits of the solution.

ST: Yes, I was going to come on to that and say, in different organisations, where there’s a focus on order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, and on the procure-to-pay side, what would you say are the main benefits experienced by an organisation?

NP: It’s quite wide-ranging of course, there’s a lot of different components to our solutions, and there’s various benefits that a company will gain. I’d say that if I had to pick a single one as the thing that really stands out I’d say it’s visibility. If you consider, before any automation, you have lots of companies, I mean really, looking at accounts payable as an isolated area for the moment, the amount of times that I’ve spoken to potential customers and they say we have an approval process for our invoices and we put them in a folder and we walk them from one office to the next. I went to visit a potential customer in London, and they had office juniors walking invoices from office to office, so if they ever had a query, an audit, they just didn’t know where the invoices were, they were just on desks waiting for someone to sign them, so there were late payments. So having all of those invoices in one place in a solution, where you can track where they are, you can see which user is approving them, you’ve got dashboards and charts and reports, it’s just revolutionary things. For most people, they don’t understand where a document is in the cycle, so that will probably be the biggest benefit that most people see when they get away from this manual handling of paper, even scanning them in and putting barcodes on them, there’s lots of manual steps required, so to remove the paper and give people control and visibility is just the number one benefit that I’ve seen for most customers.

ST: Thanks Neil, so yes that’s very interesting with visibility being the number one benefit, and I’m sure as you say there are many other benefits that a department can gain, and organisations internally, but what about externally? What sort of benefits are brought? I know these days everyone is talking about relationships outside of the organisation and strengthening those, and they talk about harmonious ecosystems. How does that work in terms of Esker and the benefits that that brings?

NP: Well I think you are right, automating something like accounts payable and the procure-to-pay cycle, you’re going to get benefits right the way across your company, with departments working closer together. I mean AP is quite a strategic part of the business anyway, I don’t think people really give it the full credit that it deserves, but outside of your company, we are trying to encourage a collaborative approach where we have ways of allowing your suppliers and customers to self-serve. We want to be able to have them accessing documents in the Esker portal. I mean Esker really sits as a front end to most processes, whether it’s order management or accounts payable, to get documents in, to have them processed and approved quickly and then flowing into the ERP system. But it’s getting users, suppliers and partners involved in that process, like, we have a conversation tool, for example. If you have any queries you can easily bat those off to the relevant people. In the old days, and before automation, you’d have lots of information in silos almost. Everyone knew what they were doing but there was no real concept of sharing. So a collaborative platform where you can process your documents but pull in all of the relevant approvals and documents, and even have your suppliers updating their information within the supplier management module, and that information can then be vetted and approved before it’s pushed into the ERP, so we can make sure that onboarding is very quick and easy, and that suppliers can really make the most of the communication that we bring, so there’s a lot of benefits both within a company but also out into the wider community as well.

ST: Yes, that’s excellent, and I guess leading on from that, that would have been a benefit during these tough economic climate times that we’re in, and a global pandemic and the like. How has that allowed for stronger business resilience?

NP: Yes the pandemic, well there’s a large topic. It’s changed a lot of things for all of us hasn’t it? From our working patterns to our day-to-day routines, everything has changed. Even in the early days of the pandemic, I have a customer in South Africa that I spoke to, and I did ask them directly, “How have things changed for you?”, and they were really grateful to have the Esker tool because they transitioned to home working really fast. The tools were there, they just need a web browser, and their connection to SAP is directly available to them within the Esker tool, so they could just push their team in a shared service centre out to home. They were working without any problems, without any configuration, it was just ready to go. So that’s really helped them to transition, and of course, we would all like to be back in the office, I am speaking to you from the office right now, so we are starting to see that process, but it feels like the future is the hybrid approach, with working from home and working from the office, so the Esker tools being cloud-based are perfect for that really because it gives you the flexibility, the choice, to work from wherever you need to, and all of the tools that you need to process your documents and handle the day-to-day tasks, they are all available at your fingertips. So it’s a nice way of bridging that gap that the pandemic has caused for us.

ST: Yes, that’s fantastic. And then, I suppose, as we move forward now, and hopefully as we get through this global pandemic, we can start now to think about the future, and understand what are some of the developments that we can really push forwards now. I know we talk about artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Is there anything on that side that you are particularly interested in or excited about for the future?

NP: Yes, well I guess this is where I show myself up as being a bit of techie, because I genuinely think that if I’m out there in the world, I don’t want to use the phrase ‘selling Esker’s solutions’, because actually we’re here to help customers buy, and that is a bit of a cliché, but it’s true. The techie in me; I absolutely love the solution that we’ve got, the way that it reads documents and the way we use artificial intelligence to learn what we’re doing, and to suggest things. I mean, it even , behind the scenes, it uses facial recognition technology to identify anomalous entries, for example, in the world of orders, if we see a quantity that we’re not expecting, it sits outside of the usual face, it flags an alert, and the technology is actually really exciting! It’s a pleasure to be involved in the development. All of Esker’s solutions are developed and rolled out in an agile way, so it’s constantly developing according to what our customers are looking for. We’ve got product management teams who are always driving the development of what the solutions are going to do, but it’s really exciting, with the technology and some of the ways that we’re trying to help automate processes for our customers, it’s really a nice place to be. And every time that we have a product release and we see what’s going to be the latest new features that are coming in, it’s genuinely an exciting time to see what we can take to our customers next, because there’s some great things coming down the pipe, some I probably can’t mention straight away. But one of the big areas of focus also, which ties back in with my history is that we have a Customer Experience (CX) Team as well, and this bridges the gap perfectly because we’ve got the solutions out there, in the world with our customers using them, and what we really don’t want to have is frustrated customers, if anything’s not working as it should do, or if they need extra training, and this is where the CX Team come in, because they sit with the customers and they understand the requirements, and they give training, and it just really helps them to get the most out of the solution and helps to improve their experience. So you know, yes, lots of things to be excited about at the moment. From a product point of view, there’s a couple of things that have come out recently, and I’ve mentioned this already, Supplier Management. That’s a really nice way of helping to onboard suppliers, and ensure that all of the documentation is up-to-date and that their information is correct, and it just helps to keep the data cleansed in the ERP. And also now Expenses. It’s an extra part we’ve added on into the P2P module, and that’s promising to be a really exciting thing that we’re doing. And of course it’s developing all the time, so lots to get our teeth into.

ST: Fantastic, sounds like there’s a lot coming!

NP: Absolutely, yes, there’s never a dull day, and also as a general point, every day is a school day, you know, we’re always learning from our customers, and trying to help them as best we can.

ST: Sure. That’s great! Superb! Thanks Neil. That was really insightful and it’s amazing to understand how far Esker’s developed its business from the early days of terminal emulation, and right up to the present day with it’s global cloud-based automation platform. And as you say, for managing an organisations’ order-to-cash and procure-to-pay cycles, so I really appreciate that.

NP: Yes, no problem, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Like I said at the start, it’s been a journey, from the days of doing terminal emulation, Esker have done a lot of things, even into faxing, postal mail delivery, SMS messages, you know, we’ve done a lot over the years. Of course, we’re fully cloud based these days, all of our solutions are available and all you really need is a web browser, we can pretty much talk to any ERP system, so there’s no real restrictions to what we do. I don’t want to keep using the word exciting, but it really is! It’s a great time to be involved in looking at solutions to help your business, so it’s a pleasure to be part of that.

ST: Fantastic, and I guess, fundamentally, although those technologies have changed over the years, the fundamental of the foundation, has always been putting the customer first, and understanding what the customers’ requirements are. I guess that’s sort of a take-away message and listening to the customer and putting into practice, and making sure that we get a good mix of understanding between people, process and the technology.

NP: Absolutely, you know I couldn’t have said it better Sam, I think the customer is always going to be king, and we’ve got to make sure that we are serving them as best we can, and that solutions are helping them in their specific industries. We don’t really target any specific industries, so we’ve got to make sure that we are listening to all the requests that we get, and that we’re heading in the right direction, but both from an account management point of view, support department, professional services team, everyone in the flow, all the way through the business, the customer is king, because without the customer, there’s no real point is there? If we’re not providing the service that we should be. It’s always been based upon helping people to automate various different processes, in their business, and just to provide a better experience for the user, rather than documents coming in and having to be manually keyed in and passed from desk to desk. It’s about helping the user to provide more value in their business really. We’re not trying to replace people, far from it, it’s about helping those people to do their job more effectively. I mean, we’re talking today primarily about procure-to-pay, but just going back for a moment to the order side, if you have typically people keying in orders in a business, and they are called the customer service team, how much customer service are they actually providing when they are keying orders? There’s not really much service going on, so if you take away the manual element of keying those documents in, then you’ve got a team who can then talk to customers and make sure they are happy, potentially upsell to them, if there’s chance to improve what they are buying or give them some ideas of promotion. So it’s just about giving the staff more time to do their job and, it sounds again quite cliché to say value-add, but that’s the point, give the people more time to get their job done effectively, remove or reduce the errors, and make sure that as a business, you’ve got people being assisted by technology, ultimately providing a better service to your customers, avoiding costly disputes and unpaid invoices. From end-to-end, you’re improving your business cycle and helping to improve your reputation, and keeping your customers happy, effectively, and that’s what we’re all trying to do.

ST: Excellent. Thanks again Neil for that, it was very insightful, and thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to join us today. So just to finish up, to listen to more Esker On Air podcasts, please visit https://www.esker.co.uk/esker-air/. Thanks again to everyone, and thanks Neil.

NP: Thanks Sam, thanks everyone, see you soon.

This discussion is also available as a podcast . Listen here.

Episode 1 in this series can be found here.

Esker UK

Unlocking Positive-Sum Growth with AI-Driven Business Solutions for P2P & O2C Cycles

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Accounts Payable: The Past
From a decade ago when invoicing was completely paper-based, AP has come a long way in the last 10 years, mostly thanks to significant and prolonged improvements in technology.
With the manual processes of old, AP staff time was taken up chasing physical signatures and tracking invoice copies.
Automation platforms paved the way for new efficiencies, and AP teams were driven to adapt and embrace these new technologies.
A continued increase in e-invoicing and the pandemic-driven move to remote working have paved the way for digital AP taking a huge leap forward.
Listen to AP: The Past by clicking here

Accounts Payable: The Present
The COVID-19 pandemic has been the most significant disruption to ever hit office-based working and AP teams have largely been able to embrace new ways of working remotely.
With lockdowns giving no choice but to work at home, finance leaders have had to place an increased level of trust in their AP staff, allow for flexibility, and embrace the use of online approvals and requisitions. For companies who haven’t already embraced AP automation, there has been an increased need to do so, in order to avoid hold-ups in the P2P cycle and damage to suppler relationships. What’s more, remote working has created an increased demand for secure, compliant systems to manage sensitive documents and transactions.
Listen to AP: The Present by clicking here

Accounts Payable: The Future
As was discussed when looking at the present state of AP, Supplier Management will continue to be a big focal point going forwards. The mass disruption to the global economy has made it more important than ever to nurture and maintain a healthy supply chain.
Increased visibility, KPIs and reporting capabilities driven by automation solutions have given way to AP becoming a more analytical department. By utilising Big Data, AP teams can now become even more strategic and ‘value-adding’ to their organisation overall.
Technology of course will continue to evolve and play an ever-increasing role in the day-to-day activities of AP teams. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will further reduce repetition and manual tasks, furthering business agility and allowing AP teams to do more with less.
Listen to AP: The Future by clicking here

Alistair Nicholas

Alistair is the Managing Director of Esker Northern Europe

Read more insights from Alistair Nicholas