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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JAGGAER
Score 8.0 out of 10
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JAGGAER is a procure-to-pay provider in the higher education and government sectors. JAGGAER eProcurement and strategic sourcing customers gain access to suppliers on a scalable, customizable platform. The JAGGAER SaaS-based, source-to-settle solution provides unparalleled visibility, insights and recommendations to procurement leaders and suppliers. The result is a fluid supply chain driven by spend analysis, contract management, and an accounts payable solutions.
I would recommend Esker based on the automation of invoice sending - it is very nice to have a tool that not only stores all of the contact info, but sends the invoices out as well. The tracking feature is great to have to see if the submission was successful. I do think that overall it could be much more user-friendly, but once you know what you're doing, it is not hard software to use.
The SciQuest application helps guide users toward preferred suppliers. The efficiencies experienced in both sending out orders to suppliers as well as bringing back invoices helps our users maintain their inventories as well as allowing them to better understand the condition of their budgets and spend because of the quick turnaround
Everything is electronic and every manager receives an email each morning telling them how many invoices they need to approve.
It has completely removed paper form the Accounts payable process and automatically archives invoices for the mandatory period required by Inland Revenue.
For monthly reporting there is visibility over what has not yet been included in the accounts and staff can follow with the tardy managers.
The workflow works great for routing requisitions to the appropriate approvers. It's also very customizable to adapt workflow to fit our current policies.
SciQuest pushes requisitions straight into our ERP, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry.
Punchouts are a great time saver for our end users to compare pricing within the same system.
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.
Well, I put it in the middle because I hope someday we will get a chance to put eProcurement suite of needed products out for RFP one day. It will not happen anytime soon due to the current administration. But I'm hopeful, and if and when it happens, SciQuest no doubt will be a strong contender.
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.
There is a 3 month learning curve and then the features are easy to use. My AP team processes 400 invoices daily through the system. The things to watch for are vendor billing mistakes (no/incorrect PO number, information discrepancies) and buyer purchase request inconsistencies. Those are part of AP anyway so maybe it is what it is. The Sciquest AP software performs as designed some improvements needed. In our system I have documented a list of 60 improvements that could increase throughput up to 50%. Those improvements include making the AP records GUI format more customized for AP purposes, and improving the QC tolerance functionality, which can be laborious to sync (Match).
They have had only a couple of very quick occasions where they were down for 1-2 minutes. One time they had a problem adding attachments. Very Reliable!
Having used SciQuest for over five years and having their competitors, SciQuest offers the best user experience and integration between vendors and ERP.
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
24/7 support. Never send you to India or some foreign country support line. Always get an answer, even if it's an answer you did not want. Always well formed conclusions/solutions to problems. They genuinely seem to care about the service they provide
We had an internal project manager who was well versed in PMI methodologies. I think the implementation would have gone far less successfully, or may even have failed entirely, without her. She was able to do all the things a project manager is supposed to do, and in an ordered and organized manner.
We investigated Readsoft early in our exploration of upgrade options. We were on Esker DeliveryWare, but the UI for Readsoft, at the time, seemed to be a little convoluted and geared towards exception handling and required tiered users. Also, Readsoft was more cost prohibitive and did not have a solution for our faxing. Though, as I understand it, they may have since found a solution for this issue
As a supplier, SciQuest is selected by our customers - we are always confident when this selection is made. One appreciates working together with SciQuest when considering some of the issues we've encountered with other marketplace/procurement solutions: - Uneven support from staff who were less than fully trained - Non-adherence to standards such as cXML despite claims to be compliant - Difficulty garnering project resources necessary to complete an implementation - Outdated and error-prone catalog management portals
Highly reliable remotely hosted PTP solution that interfaces with our remote OCR vendor and with university sited operational servers. Twice a year over the last 3 years a SciQuest/OCR system file handling or network problem occurs that gets fixed within a day.
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.
Customers seem to be fine with selecting requisition items and having them pushed back via carts to a legacy system.
Converting one's legacy ERP system to a SaaS solution may prove to be too much of an overhaul in regards to converting to a new set of rules which do not fit exactly with current business processes. The inability to enhance in great detail is also a drawback for customers coming from a highly modifiable system.
