Esker Strengthens its Presence in the Pharmaceutical and Medical Equipment Industry

Online, July 23, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Madison, WI, July 22, 2010 - Esker, the leader in document process automation solutions, announced today that several prominent players in the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry - including Bayer, Biomnis, Fresenius Medical Care, MEDRAD and Roche Italia - have chosen Esker solutions to automate the processing of business documents, and sales orders in particular. With its expertise, Esker strengthens its position in this market with the release of its latest white paper ―Finding the Cure for Order Processing Pain in the Life Sciences Industry.

"Health care cost controls, tighter regulations, expired patents and the growth of generic drugs are some of the many constraints that companies are facing in this industry at a time when they need to cuts costs without compromising on the level of service offered to the patients. Automating business document processes, and particularly purchase orders, helps companies reduce their costs, said Emmanuel Olivier, COO of Esker.

Organizations in the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industry receive thousands of sales orders daily from hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and doctors who use fax or postal mail to send their purchase orders. These sales orders must be entered and processed manually, with all the associated drawbacks: no traceability, no quality control tracking, no priority management, a higher risk of error - and all of this with patients' health at stake.

Esker solutions address this set of issues by automating the entire purchase order management process and reducing the error rate, which represents an important challenge for organizations specialized in health care activities. In concrete terms, the solution automates the reception of purchase orders, routes them according to predefined criteria (customer, product, geographic area, etc.), captures data, checks their consistency, integrates them to information systems, archives the documents and provides traceability and reporting.

Esker releases the white paper "Finding the Cure for Order Processing Pain in the Life Sciences Industry"

In this new white paper Esker summarizes the unique challenges organizations face when processing sales orders in the medical equipment and pharmaceutical industry. Based on the experience Esker has gained over the years through project implementations worldwide, this white paper provides a strategic outlook on the issues faced, and covers solutions implemented for industry leaders.

MEDRAD automates the flow of inbound sales orders into SAP applications
MEDRAD, a subsidiary of Bayer Shering Pharma, is a worldwide market leader of medical devices and services that enable or enhance diagnostic and therapeutic imaging procedures. Using Esker solutions, MEDRAD automates the integration of 70,000 sales orders per year into its SAP applications.

"These manual steps were a tremendous time constraint. Processing orders through Esker DeliveryWare is 76 percent faster than the manual process. Now, over a year later, we have automated close to 40 percent of all our inbound purchase orders. Our goal is to become paperless, explained Mike Green, Technical Analyst at MEDRAD.

White Paper available upon request

Corporate Contact: Renee Thomas, Esker Inc. - Tel: 608.828.6140 - Email: [email protected]

Investor Relations Contact: Emmanuel Olivier, Esker S.A. - Tel: 33 (0)4 72 83 46 46 - Email: [email protected]