Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for finance and customer service functions, today announced that Olympique de Marseille, a French professional soccer club, is automating its procure-to-pay (P2P) processes with Esker’s AI-driven Procure-to-Pay suite. Thanks to Esker, Olympique de Marseille (OM) has successfully automated administrative and financial processes to free up their teams from time-consuming manual tasks and gain visibility into budgets.

As part of its strategy to strengthen its financial resilience, OM had been searching for a scalable automation solution to revamp its accounts payable (AP) management and optimize purchase and expense request processes.

In the sports industry, having a perfect command of financial processes can promote a company’s economic resilience. OM’s financial operations need to be highly agile and reactive to changing circumstances. With over 300 suppliers generating between 1,000 and 1,500 invoices per month — in non-pandemic times — the entire supplier cycle needed to be optimized. While the old manual process provided zero oversight over unbilled payables, the outdated paper-based purchase request and expense tracking system also called for a modern upgrade.

Applying a 360-degree approach to automating the entire P2P cycle, Esker worked closely with OM to design a scalable solution that was fully aligned with the specific needs of the company’s ecosystem.

“The adoption of Esker's Procure-to-Pay suite has been a real plus for my job and has enabled me to save significant amounts of time on a daily basis,” said Marjorie Bouet, AP Manager at OM. “The quick reconciliation with purchase orders makes it much easier to enter invoices. Esker's support and collaboration have led to a successful solution adoption.”

Esker’s Accounts Payable solution, implemented in 2019 and Esker’s Procurement solution, implemented in 2020 for all seven of OM’s business branches, deliver considerable time savings, quick supplier integration and optimized workflows for purchase request validation. Esker also deployed a wide range of additional functionalities to make OM’s work processes more fluid, including auto-fill of form fields to accelerate data entry, expense metrics and graphs to provide real-time budget tracking and new supplier forms to facilitate onboarding.

“Today our objective has been met — we have better overall visibility on the evolution of expenditure and improved tracking of unbilled payables,” said Philippe Cambier, Head Accountant at OM. “At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt game calendars and rules, the time saved by Esker's solutions allows us to focus more on the analysis of our data."

A durable and efficient collaboration

Apart from showing a good understanding of current and future needs and the rapid and transparent solution integration, what appealed to OM the most was Esker’s quality of support and training. The 120 solution users were up and running quickly due to the practical, intuitive, user-friendly solution interface, despite the constraints of remote work during the solution’s implementation phase.

“As soon as we met with the Esker teams, we felt that they had a modular solution that was perfectly suited to our needs,” said Marjorie Lagrange, Financial Controller at OM. “We were immediately attracted by its user-friendly and intuitive interface. We now have an efficient collaboration process in place."

“Our proven expertise in the sports sector enabled us to quickly understand OM’s expectations,” said Jean-Michel Bérard, CEO at Esker. “We make it a point of honor to accompany our customers from design to production. In the case of OM, we worked hand in hand to build a solution that could evolve at the same pace as the club's digital transformation."

About Olympique de Marseille

Olympique de Marseille is a French professional soccer club based in Marseille. Having won three League cups, one Champions League victory and 11 French championship titles, Olympique de Marseille has the largest number of supporters in France — 13 million fans on its digital platforms. The team plays at the Orange Velodrome, which has the capacity to hold 67,000 spectators.

About Esker

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 solutions incorporate technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive increased productivity, enhanced visibility, reduced fraud risk, and improved collaboration with customers, suppliers and internally. Esker operates in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific with global headquarters in Lyon, France, and U.S. headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information on Esker and its solutions, visit www.esker.com. Follow Esker on LinkedIn and join the conversation on the Esker blog at blog.esker.com.

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