Esker announced that it has been selected by Palmer Holland, a North American specialty chemical and ingredient distributor of raw materials, to automate its order-to-cash (O2C) cycle. Esker has deep roots providing automation solutions for companies in the chemical industry, and this partnership expands Esker’s reach into the market.
Wanting to facilitate faster, more efficient order management and collections processes, Palmer Holland sought a highly scalable solution with the capacity to automate the full O2C cycle. Through a single unified interface, Esker gives Palmer Holland the digital foundation needed to unite its customer service and accounts receivable (AR) departments, support its continued growth, and increase its competitive advantage. Among the company’s goals in the move toward automation, Palmer Holland is looking forward to freeing its staff members from mundane, repetitive tasks so it has more time to deliver quality service to a growing customer base.
“Our company is very customer-focused, and we needed a solution that will help us streamline our processes to support our growth,” said Charlie Laurie, Chief Innovation Officer at Palmer Holland. “We’re excited to work with Esker not only because their solutions will help us continue to exceed our principal’s and customer’s expectations, but their level of customer service will make for a successful, long-term partnership.”
Optimized order processing
The order management process for Palmer Holland is high touch due to the nature of working with specialty chemicals and ingredients. To ensure that each customer receives the level of personal interaction needed through the order management process, Palmer Holland is using Esker’s Order Management solution to automate its order entries and allow its customer representatives more time with customers.
One reason Palmer Holland chose Esker is because of Esker Synergy, the company’s deep-learning, auto-recognition technology. Esker trained a neural network to be an expert at finding information in an order by learning from real-world orders processed on Esker’s platform with the associated data extracted and validated by users. If the extracted data is not perfect, the auto-learning technology comes in play to improve recognition on future, similar orders.
This improves the first-time recognition of orders, reducing the manual overhead of introducing a new order and allowing for an expedited return on investment.
Addressing collections inefficiency
In the current business environment where customer service can be the differentiator, Palmer Holland sees the AR collection process as an area with significant potential. Partnering with Esker allows Palmer Holland to communicate with customers about open invoices proactively, initiating a dialog with the goal of not only collecting payment, but also identifying problems that could delay payment.
Palmer Holland recognized that decreasing its days sales outstanding (DSO) by one day would lead to an increase in revenue and sought a solution that would streamline its AR process. By implementing Esker’s Accounts Receivable solution, Palmer Holland is now equipped to improve customer service and increase productivity and efficiency while reducing DSO.
