Eric Bussy is VP Product Management & Marketing at Esker, one of the world's leading providers of document automation solutions for inbound and outbound processes ranging from customer and supplier invoices, dispatch notes, sales orders and purchase orders to remittance advices. As the man responsible for the development of products, services and solutions at the multinational, IDM asked him what it’s like to steer a course through such a diverse landscape today where companies need everything from  cloud based data exchange to physical delivery by post and fax, via both on-premise and cloud platforms.

IDM: Esker has a long background in document processing, can you give me a bit of a timeline for the company:

EB: Esker comes from outbound document management, but a bit over eight years ago we entered into the inbound document processing arena with sales order processing as the first process. From there we naturally wanted to cover the cash conversion cycle, so accounts payable (AP) Automation was a place we needed to go. For both processes we started with on-premise solutions using our Esker DeliveryWare server and made our first move to cloud in 2005. Right now the company is geared towards the cloud, it’s more than a trend it's just happening everywhere.

IDM: There is a whole range of inbound and outbound document automation solutions available in the market today. What are some areas where you think Esker has a marked difference?

EB: One of the ways our technology for AP automation is different from other players in that the workflow is outside SAP rather than being inside SAP.  We do it this way because there are many companies that operate multiple ERP platforms, they might have SAP and JD Edwards and others so having the workflow inside SAP will not fly for them. They also want to standardise their processes outside of the ERP so this increases productivity for all back office processes and decrease the complexity associated with ERP upgrades and other integration issues. Being outside of SAP opens us to a wider market, from tier 1 companies to the SMB space, where productivity gains are also important in these challenging economic times. 

IDM: Esker is well known for specialising in automated sales order processing solutions for SAP systems. Is that your primary focus?

EB: 50% of our customers run SAP with the rest runs Oracle, Microsoft and a range of other ERP solutions. The cloud is allowing us to address the needs of companies of any size, with as little as 1,000 invoices a month to process. The reduction in processing cost is one reason we can offer solutions that make sense for medium-sized organisations, but even more important is the fact that the investment in configuration that's necessary is falling considerably. Many organisations are happy with an out of the box solution that handles 90% of their workflow needs and so they don't need to spend months with expensive consultants. Salesforce has shown the way in many respects. In days past an Oracle CRM user who just wanted to get a dashboard might require 3-4 hours with a consultant at $200 per hour. Then you switch to Salesforce and you can create a dozen yourself in an hour. Not requiring a consultancy firm to configure a solution is the secret, that's what made salesforce.com such a success. Making document process automation solutions available to a wider market has been our strategy. The cloud enables that. 

IDM: Salesforce and other CRM providers have certainly succeeded in their cloud offerings, would you say ERP and document processing are at the same stage of acceptance of cloud strategies?

EB: We see cloud-based business applications and services as the way of the future, and it’s important to Esker to continue establishing itself as the leader in this growing field. However it’s still early days and CRM on demand is a lot more popular than ERP on demand, In Australia we would estimate that more than 90% of ERP deployments are on-premise, although there are lots of conversations about the cloud. Things will change rapidly. Customers want to go with the solution that will give them the maximum benefits in the shortest time possible. Esker On Demand provides this.

IDM: Companies evaluating an invoice processing solution traditionally make the choice between in-house deployment or a business process outsourcer (BPO). How does Esker DeliveryWare fit into that competitive landscape?

EB: We are often competing with BPOs and the main concern for companies there is security and the loss of visibility of documents as they process through an externally managed workflow. Cloud computing on the other hand has the same ability to offload the technical complexity and infrastructure while you are still hands-on with your documents. It also gives you the advantage of scalability so cloud computing is just becoming a natural way for CFOs. But Esker is also happy to partner with BPOs in providing its DeliveryWare cloud solution as the processing platform, which scales much better than any on-premise platform they can implement themselves. Traditionally the BPO has to invest millions of dollars in technologies for scanning, OCR and workflow and make different technologies work together in their data centre. They then have to manage the full complexity of technology integration, maintenance and lifecycle as versions change. They are not just doing BPO they are doing IT integration. Instead they can use our cloud to provide OCR, workflow and archiving, the three main blocks of an AP automation solution.

IDM: What is Esker's view on the future of document exchange networks?

EB: We believe that open inter-operable networks are an important part of the future and that is on our roadmap. We have millions of organisations already sending and receiving documents through our global platform. For instance Toshiba is using Esker on Demand for accounts receivable in the US and sending out documents to 150,000+ of its customers. We do have some instances where we are handling both the send and receive sides. At both ends we have the electronic data and yet it still goes out by paper and comes in at the other side through a scanner. AR is on one side and AP is on the other, we are building a bridge and eventually it will meet in the middle.

IDM: Where have the main improvements been in document processing technology, and where is the major focus for Esker?

EB: Document process automation technology is progressing steadily. The technology to capture from paper using OCR is improving little by little, we use both the Nuance and ABBYY engines, as each has specific language advantages. It’s also true that production scanners are getting better, smaller and less expensive. But I see the major improvement is in infrastructure as a service, maintaining a data centre is still a lot of work which we can remove from the equation on the customer side. So Esker can bring all the technologies together, whether its pdf conversion, archiving workflow or capture.