Minneapolis—March 19, 2012—Pentair Inc., a global provider of water movement, treatment and storage products and systems, now leverages Esker’s DeliveryWare to automate the processing of supplier invoices and sales orders into its SAP system; and other inbound accounts payable and sales order documents. As a result, the company has seen significant gains in productivity, visibility and overall process improvement.
“We had a lot of paper getting pushed around for approvals,” said Dan Hughes, Manager of Business Technology, Financial Applications, Pentair Inc. “All the time and effort of that paper workflow was the key driver for us to automate and gain visibility into the process.”
Esker DeliveryWare also positioned Pentair to meet its objectives for AP shared services.
“The Esker technology puts us in place to be able to realize the benefits of what we want to do with shared services in terms of opening up the door with bandwidth for us to take on more of the business and to gain automation synergies,” said Hughes.
With sales orders coming in to eight fax machines from 20 different fax numbers, “at any given time we had about one quarter of the order entry team roaming the room trying to find orders to answer customer inquiries,” confirmed John Bartleson, Director of Customer Advocacy at Pentair. “We wanted to get rid of the paper and improve the process,” he said. Converting hard-copy documents into scanned images for archiving was another element of the process. “We had a separate data storage of the documents, so there was a fair amount of scanning required every day,” Bartleson added.
Now, Pentair staff can see the image of the order immediately and do not have to get up from their desks to chase down orders or wait a day for an order to be scanned in. Noting that Pentair staff is more productive, Bartleson sees a better level of customer service as the real value of these gains.
“Our people now have the ability to provide quicker answers,” he said. “One of our mottos is ‘one call, one answer’ and the Esker solution contributes to that.”
By automating accounts payable and sales order processing with the Esker solution, Pentair is able to:
- Get document images into the SAP system 24 hours faster than before
- Eliminate at least 2 hours of scanning per day
- Gain visibility to find orders in the electronic queue
- Reduce invoice processing time
- Eliminate the need to add headcount for document processing
In delivering these benefits, the Esker solution enabled Pentair to implement in phases and get quick, tangible wins for the business. “Our approach is to add value incrementally, and that’s what we did with Esker,” Bartleson concluded.
