Mercury Systems Customer Story

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About Mercury Systems

Mercury Systems is a technology company that pushes processing power to the tactical edge, making the latest commercial technologies profoundly more accessible for today’s most challenging aerospace and defense missions. From silicon to system scale, Mercury enables customers to accelerate innovation and turn data into decision superiority. Mercury is headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts, and has 24 locations worldwide.

Challenges

Before automating its accounts payable (AP) process, Mercury Systems had many manual accounting processes in place that required a large chunk of time and effort to maintain. For starters, each invoice had to be manually checked, identified, classified and saved into the corresponding invoice folder, which can be extremely tedious when you’re dealing with hundreds and even thousands of invoices every month. There were also processes for direct versus indirect spend that resulted in many emails being sent in order to move the process along. One of the most frustrating examples was within the direct spend process when products were identified in the system as “not received.” Because purchase orders were segmented across business units, it was a challenge for AP to easily identify “non-received” items for proper follow up, confirmation and payment, requiring emails and other manual routes for tracking and vouchering of invoices. Esker provides the ability to search and filter items by status, providing visibility of all invoices across all business units on one screen, streamlining the payment process.

Solution

Roadblocks to productivity including an increase in the workload on the accounting department, an increase in business units, as well as limits set in place by their ERP led Mercury Systems to look for a product that could help alleviate some of these pain points — and that’s where Esker Accounts Payable came in. Upon implementing their AP solution, the day-to-day life of the department became considerably easier. The department was able to achieve a higher level of visibility that wasn’t possible with their ERP alone. This means that all involved parties are able to view invoices and their statuses, thus cutting down the number of emails needed to be sent to check the status of a particular invoice. The AP team is also now able to filter invoices by statuses, allowing them to dedicate more time to invoices that need immediate attention rather than ones that can wait a day or two.

While there are many features within Esker that benefit the AP department, there is one that stands out. Mercury Sr. Principal Accountant Michelle Chan said,

     “The one feature that I love the most about Esker is the accrual report. Before Esker, our AP team had to manually calculate the AP accrual by reviewing every invoice that could not be posted to the prior month before month-end. With Esker, most invoices are automatically matched to the PO lines with predefined cost centers upon submission. Esker only requires the AP team to ensure that all invoices are submitted and split. By day two of accounting close, we have the AP accrual report ready.”

Built-in features like this provide end users with the ability to automate what would have once been a manual task, enabling them to work on more value-added tasks for the organization.

Results

From a staff and organization standpoint, there have been many different benefits that they have been able to achieve through their Esker solution, one of which is enhanced collaboration across multiple business units. Mercury Systems provides an array of different products, from servers and subsystems to head-up displays for military vehicles, and previously, invoice processing was done separately for each of these business units. Now, Mercury has the ability to look up and process invoices for each subset of their business — something that wasn’t possible with their old system.

Another benefit from a compliance perspective is the ability to set up workflows so invoices don’t get posted until all company policies are met. “The customization in the workflow, which prevents invoices from being sent to the ERP system for posting until the company policy is met, is a significant win for compliance,” Chan said.

This ensures every box is being ticked and invoices don’t slip through the cracks without being fully compliant. Vendors are reaping the benefits of Esker Accounts Payable as well. The Vendor Portal allows vendors to submit their invoices electronically and see the status of their invoice payments, helping improve the vendors experience and cut down on the number of calls they may receive about invoice statuses.

With all these benefits comes an improvement to employee morale as well. Upon the implementation of Esker, employees were disappointed that there were now two systems to reconcile a PO issue. Purchase order creation and issuance is still being handled by the existing Oracle ERP system, meaning the data must be checked to ensure it is correct both in Oracle and Esker. But after becoming more familiar with the new process, employees were able to recognize the many benefits that Esker has to offer them. Now, employees are able to spend more time performing analytical tasks and less time doing tedious manual entries, thus improving their day-to-days and making work more enjoyable.

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