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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SAP Ariba Procurement
Score 7.8 out of 10
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SAP Ariba's Procurement capabilities are to provide innovations in guided buying and spot buy, plus supplier and catalog enablement, and integration with Ariba Network – which the vendor states is more than 4.6 million connected companies strong and growing.
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.
SAP Ariba is well suited for complicated procurement processes requiring lot of inter department interfacinng and comments and reviews at every stage. It is possible to maintain complete history of the procurement cycle and records inputs from all stakeholders- internal and external. It automatically creates a to do function on the system of the person at whose desk any issue remains unresolved.
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.
Integration with other tools is not very good. The APIs provided are not scheduled within the Ariba process and must use a middleware to send information back and forth between tools
Customer support for configuration questions. The response time can be weeks or months waiting time and the response back is often unhelpful.
Flexibility with company entities. With a large company with so many entities it is hard to structure and customize your suppliers into many entities. You often have to duplicate.
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.
As an end user I tend to prefer modern interfaces. It may be good for the backend users in accounting, but for me it is obvious that all the email notifications and built in interface is lacking on the overall state of UI/UX in the industry. It is not the worst of course if compared to those of the biggest competitors though (company starting with "O").
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
SAP Ariba support comes with multiple options. The standard support model for all customers is the shared service model where the SLAs are acceptable.
For customers with critical needs, a paid upgrade is offered in the form of 'Preferred support'. This paid service promises better SLAs and Best Practice literature and services from Ariba.
The Bad -
Some service issues get caught in between SAP Ariba support and SAP support. This triage may result in a loss of time for customers.
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.
I have and still use Coupa. Coupa is much less robust in comparison to Ariba. SAP Ariba Procurement has the ability to see what transactions have been sent, the ability to resend cXML Purchase Orders, see a history of what has happened with transactions, much more robust reporting capabilities, etc. SAP Ariba Procurement is 5-10 times better than Coupa in my opinion.
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.
Improving Broadspectrum's PIFOT for suppliers who have migrated to invoicing through Ariba.
Provided a simple end-user interface to support PO creation, which has improved internal business process. This has led to good quality PO's being created upfront, which has reduced unnecessary re-work to ensure invoices are paid on time, and improved the businesses capability to report on real time commitment.
