LGC Customer Story

Background

As a global leader in the life sciences industry, LGC receives several thousand orders per month, the majority of which are received via email with some in XML format. Looking to replace its time-consuming manual order entry process and with no way to easily accept XML orders, LGC selected Esker’s Order Management automation solution to bring new levels of speed and efficiency to its process.

Solution

Prior to automation, LGC sales office staff were spending much of their time manually entering orders into the company’s IFS ERP system, with each order taking up to 8 minutes to manually enter across multiple screens. Now, order entry time for key customers is nearly down to zero as the order is entered into Esker’s solution and validated by the sales team before an email confirmation is automatically generated by the ERP. Esker’s archiving function enables sales staff to easily locate previous orders in case of any queries, complaints, etc.

One functionality LGC prioritised when choosing a new order management solution was the ability to seamlessly integrate with its IFS ERP system. That was a big advantage with Esker, as integration was already a part of the solution. This meant that fewer LGC IT resources were required and solution implementation was simplified. Esker connects to the IFS ERP via a web service to check part numbers and prices from an order. If the part numbers are incorrect or the prices are outside of a set threshold, the order is flagged for review. Due to the sensitive and technical nature of some of LGC’s products, certain items are configured to be flagged within Esker to the sales team for priority review.

Benefits

LGC has seen both customer and employee satisfaction increase since implementing Esker. Customers have noticed increased efficiency with orders being processed faster and more reliably, all without any changes required on their end. And sales teams can validate the orders in Esker and then process them in the ERP system without any manual data entry.

One of the key benefits of Esker’s solution is the ability for us to send orders of key customers directly through to Esker. This also enables our sales team to view and validate those orders only once in the Esker environment and achieve full downstream automation until the order is created in our ERP system.
Kemantha Jayawardhana | Project Manager

Esker has also facilitated remote working during the pandemic, as sales staff are easily able to move their work to home due to the cloud-based nature of Esker.

Esker order management software became particularly useful during this recent pandemic, since it provided a reliable platform for our sales office staff to enter and process orders from their homes without the need to log into our in-house ERP system.
Kemantha Jayawardhana | Project Manager

Future Plans

Following their success with Esker’s Order Management solution in the U.K., LGC is looking to expand the solution to Italy and France. Additionally, LGC is currently implementing Esker’s Accounts Receivable solution to drive added value and efficiency across the full order-to-cash cycle, from initial order taking to sending accurate and compliant e-invoices to get paid faster.