Esker is a global cloud platform built to unlock strategic value for finance and customer service professionals and strengthen collaboration between companies by automating the cash conversion cycle. Esker’s mission is to build a foundation that promotes positive-sum growth, increased productivity, improved employee engagement, and greater trust between organizations.
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MasterControl Quality Excellence
Score 8.2 out of 10
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The MasterControl Quality Excellence suite bundles a number of products supporting work quality and compliance including training and exams, incidents and corrective actions (CA), documents and change, and other modules.
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.
This system has made it very easy to keep our records straight and cleaned up. We have the choice to make them released or leave them in draft. If used appropriately, there is only one of each document that can be constantly revved up instead of having so many different versions of a PDF on our company's server that could even be corrupted. The history of each version is tracked, and you can see all the changes in one area. It is hard to see if there are copies in the system, and that can be hard. I have trained my end users to search before putting in another document, but that doesn't always happen. If they are not writing why they have something in the system or the changes from each revision, you will have to do more searching yourself or have to ask that person. So sometimes it's an end-user error.
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.
Their new report writer is not user friendly yet. MasterControl has listened to its clients and have been making small changes to assist reporting. There is still room for improvement though.
Rapid company growth means many new staff. Some tech support staff know less than the customers they are supporting.
During the past five years, we expanded our business and its quality control, and we hadn't had any issues even when we grew the company's size around five times. The software has proved itself during these years, and now we rely on it heavily and don't think we need to switch to any other similar product in the near future.
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.
MasterControl Quality Excellence is easy to use when you dedicate the time. However many companies do not have that bandwidth to learn the system and will not use the system until they have to. Unfortunately creating errors, mistakes that are hard to fix.
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
The Technical Support team has grown exponentially over the last couple years. Some front line support staff are new to the system and so know less than the clients do. Back line staff are more seasoned and provide immediate assistance to the front line staff. They have an extensive knowledge bank to assist them as well as client access to most KB articles. Annual user group conference gives us chance to meet the support staff an also to resolve any outstanding issues. Any critical vendor notices are emailed immediately when found and a patch offered at the same time. These are rare, but quickly resolved.
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.
Hands down, MasterControl Quality Excellence worked a million times better than SmartSolve. While SmartSolve was definitely cheaper, we struggled with that system immensely and it only had documents and training for corporate functions because after implementation, it was clear that it would be a difficult solution for our old Lotus Notes based systems. MasterControl Quality Excellence has been a great solution and enabled us to retire all but one of our old Lotus Notes databases (out of hundreds).
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 have been able to whittle down the number of databases that our documents are kept in from well over 50 to a single location in MasterControl.
We've been able to convert paper training records into electronic training records when using MasterControl, which is saved a lot of time on the production floor keeping track of training.
By having the same tool and format across multiple places in the business it has helped the organization become more efficient.
