Olympique de Marseille: modern finance with Esker P2P suite

In an announcement made by Esker - a global cloud platform and leader in AI process automation solutions - the company has partnered with Olympique de Marseille - a French professional football club - to automate the club’s procure-to-pay (P2P) processes. 

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

“Our proven expertise in the sports sector enabled us to quickly understand OM’s expectations. We make it a point of honour 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,"  added Jean Michel Bérard, CEO at Esker.

Automating administrative and financial processes

By harnessing Esker’s AI-driven P2P suite, the club has successfully automated its administrative and financial processes in order to free up their teams time from time-consuming manual tasks, as well as gain visibility into budgets. 

The partnership comes as part of Olympique de Marseille@s strategy to strengthen its financial resilience. The club has been searching for a scalable automation solution that could revamp its accounts payable (AP) management, and optimise purchase and expense request processes.

Olympique de Marseille current has over 300 suppliers generating between 1,000 and 1,500 invoices a month (in non-pandemic times), as a result, this function needed optimisation to improve the companies oversight into unbilled payables, and modernise its purchase request and expense tracking. 

Esker applied a 360-degree approach to automating the club’s entire P2P cycle, designing a scalable solution in close collaboration with Olympique de Marseille to fully align the solution with the company’s needs. 

“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. 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,” said Marjorie Bouet, AP Manager at Olympique de Marseille.

Implementation

Esker implemented its Account Payable solution in 2019, and its Procurement solution in 2020 for all seven of Olympique de Marseille’s business branches, providing the club with considerable time savings, quick supplier integration, and optimised workflows for purchase request validation. 

In addition, Esker deployed functionalities to make the work processes at Olympique de Marseille more fluid, including auto-fill of form fields for accelerated data entry, expense metrics and graphs for 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.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,” said Philippe Cambier, Head Accountant at Olympique de Marseille.