Esker offers their eponymous document automation platform, for paperless ordering and billing, and accounts payable / accounts receivable (AP / AR). It can be delivered as a cloud offering (as Esker on Demand), or on-premise (as Esker DeliveryWare).
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Kofax Capture
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Kofax Capture is a suite of multichannel document capture applications.
Kofax is very similar to Esker in terms of functionality as well as ease of use. I feel that both programs work well, but neither is very user-friendly. Kofax is more expensive, which is why Esker wins.
Esker On Demand is great for Sales Order Processing order creation. We use it with web services. It can make table read calls, test order creations (simulate order), and help with order creation. They are also working on change order management, but if you have multiple order entry methods or touch points, this feature may not be usable for your company.
Kofax [Capture] meets our needs and for the most part is easy to use and setup. Configuration could be a little bit easier. The scripting language is a double edge sword if you will. It gives you nearly unlimited possibilities to script what you need, but the downside is you have to script it. Does a good job at batching and scanning documents. The tool integrates well into our workflow which makes our business partners happy and in turn provides for happy customers.
The VRS application included with Kofax Capture is the best image pre-processing platform available on the market today. It can handle a wide array of common document problems such as skew, flipping, wrinkles, lines, and dots.
The platform is incredibly scriptable and can be customized to handle all sorts of unusual document contents to allow information to be extracted that many other platforms just struggle on. Table extraction, line item matching, and smart extraction are all strong points with this platform.
Through the use of SBL and .NET the platform can be expanded and scaled quite easily to allow for the software to be integrated into existing business processes and platforms with ease.
We can't enter credit memos in Esker. Need to enter in SAP and then link.
PO invoices that were trained to go into the PO bucket, route into the non-PO buckets.
Freight invoices that have had hundreds going into the non-PO bucket have a tendency to route to the PO-bucket because a PO number is referenced on page 7.
We struggled with configuring Kofax with AP Automation. We used to receive vouchers in different formats by different companies, by different departments. The people from different departments used to scan those vouchers through regular scanners to a central location, which ended up as image pdfs. We fed these image pdfs through Kofax Capture for character recognition, which was painful as the accuracy of recognition was 50 to 60%.
Having a connectors with a workflow tool would be helpful where people can validate and approve the output.
More samples and documentation related to use of API in .NET applications would be a good improvement, that would help users to adapt the product easily into their organization.
Esker does everything that it promises to do, but it is very hard to figure out. I am a very tech-savvy person, but I needed extensive training to be able to use the basic functions of Esker. Once you know what you're doing, it's not too hard, but I don't understand why they couldn't make it easier to use.
They have been very helpful and the online support site is awesome. They keep the site up to date with the latest changes and present challenges to keep learning the new updates to keep things entertaining. They are overall a great crew to work with
I have listed a few that we considered but there were many more in the initial assessment, Esker was priced well and had the best user interface. Was really easy to use and the implementation process was well designed. It was a system that could handle a two tiered delegations of authority for project expenditure and operational expenditure.
Quality of data capture. Automatic data integration with Oracle and SAP ERP. Automatic image integration with Oracle and SAP ERP. Automatic invoice booking in Oracle and SAP ERP.
We now have reporting available down to the individual field level (changes, errors, etc) and can calculate cost to serve.
It replaced on-premise hardware with cloud SaaS that is more cost effective and risk adverse.
It is more intuitive; we can put new hires on order entry and experience less user errors. As a solution owner who fixes problems and answers questions, I don't find myself having to "think" about Esker and it has become a smaller part of my job now that end-users are more self-sufficient.
We were able to decrease personnel expenditures as there was not a need for individuals to index documents prior to incorporating them into the record.