Ball Horticultural Company to Automate Accounts Payable in SAP

Ball plans to extend its use of Esker DeliveryWare to automate the processing of inbound accounts payable documents within SAP application

Madison, Wis.Sept. 4, 2013—Esker, a provider of document process automation solutions, and SAPsoftware solution and technology partner, announced that Ball Horticultural Company, one of the nation’s largest sellers of commercial seed for flowers and ornamental crops, selected to extend its use of Esker DeliveryWare to automate the processing of inbound accounts payable (AP) documents within its SAP application.

This latest initiative equips Ball with intelligent data capture and touchless processing capabilities to streamline its AP process, and positions the company to achieve its goals of reducing outstanding sales, improving cash flow and effectively managing resources during peak business season. Ball’s seasonal peaks were previously mitigated by hiring temps to manually sort and enter thousands of invoices.

“Because we’re a business-to-business company, cash flow issues can arise during the process of receiving an invoice from suppliers and getting a payment from customers,” said Mark Morris, director of information technology at Ball Horticultural Company. “It’s not uncommon to bring in many temps during our busy season to help manage all of the paper. With Esker, we’re hoping to significantly reduce the amount of time and labor needed, with the overall goal of getting suppliers with the most complex invoices live and touchless with Esker.”

Ball first began to use Esker DeliveryWare in 2008 as a basic “quit paper” solution to address the challenges of subscription management, eventually helping the company eliminate the need to print and file paper documents, and enable customers and suppliers to go paperless. The option to expand to multiple business processes was a key selling point for Ball, knowing it would eventually want to leverage OCR and link documentation into SAP to achieve a fully automated operation.

During implementation, Ball was thoroughly impressed by how quickly Esker stepped in, identified the issues the company was facing and developed a strategic plan of action.

Esker provides document process automation solutions. Addressing all types of business processes—from accounts payable and accounts receivable to sales order processing and procurement—Esker cloud computing solutions enable companies to automate the reception, processing and sending of any business document with one platform. Esker helps more than 80,000 companies across the world reduce the use of paper and eliminate manual processes, while improving productivity, efficiency and environmental impact.

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