Digital workers with Esch & Pickel and MR.KNOW: upload a job description and get an initial AI-based assessment of your potential.
In 5 steps to your digital colleague.
Upload a job ad or paste a URL.
AI checks tasks, workflows and automation potential – including a BPMN preview.
Digital worker as Assistant, Agent or Worker.
Seamless integration into ERP, CRM, HR – cloud or on-premise.
Monitoring, governance and ongoing optimisation.
Hardly any area is as rule-bound, as deadline-driven and as hard to staff as finance. That combination makes it the strongest entry point for digital workers: clear rules, recurring cases, verifiable results – and systems that are already in place with DMS and ERP.
Invoices arrive as PDF, as XRechnung or ZUGFeRD, by email, portal or on paper. A digital worker reads them, matches them against purchase order and goods receipt, codes them according to your rule set and starts the approval in the right branch.
This does not replace the DMS – it is the layer above it: the digital worker decides who has to review, what may pass straight through, and when a human is needed.
Early-payment discount terms – typically 2 % within ten days – are not lost in accounting but in the approvers' inboxes. A digital worker prioritises by due date and discount deadline, follows up on its own and only escalates when a deadline is genuinely at risk.
The effect hits liquidity directly and can be quantified per creditor – which makes this use case an ideal pilot.
Matching incoming payments, clearing open items, handling partial payments and remittance advices, triggering dunning levels, passing disputes to sales: work that comes up every day and requires no real decision – only diligence.
Digital workers handle it around the clock and at constant quality. Anything ambiguous goes to the responsible person as a case for clarification – with all documents already attached.
Monthly, quarterly and annual close is deadline work: accruals, provisions, intercompany reconciliation, balance confirmations. Under section 264 of the German Commercial Code (HGB), corporations must prepare the annual financial statements within the first three months of the following financial year – small companies within six.
A digital worker runs the closing checklist, requests contributions, follows up on what is missing, documents every completed item and keeps the current status visible – instead of managing it in a spreadsheet.
Most of the time in controlling goes into gathering data: exports from ERP, DMS, time recording and upstream systems, merged by hand in Excel – and again from scratch next month.
Digital workers pull the data from the source systems based on rules, check it for plausibility, produce the reporting package and distribute it. Variances above defined thresholds go to the responsible department automatically as a request for comment. Controlling gets its actual job back: the analysis.
Since 1 January 2025 companies in Germany must be able to receive e-invoices compliant with EN 16931 in B2B transactions; transitional periods for issuing them run until the end of 2027. On top of that come the GoBD requirements for traceability, immutability and process documentation, plus retention periods of eight to ten years.
Digital workers follow modelled BPMN 2.0 processes: every step versioned, every rule documented, every case explainable afterwards – to auditors, to the tax authorities and in the electronically supported payroll audit (euBP).
Esch & Pickel is an IT system house based in Koblenz, Germany. For more than 35 years it has guided mid-sized companies across many industries towards digital excellence – with business software that grows with them and creates real value.
The portfolio covers the three areas commercial processes depend on: document and information management, ERP, and digital portals. More than 2,000 completed projects and over 350 active customers stand behind it – from manufacturers and associations to city administrations.
That is exactly where the MR.KNOW digital workers come in: they orchestrate the workflows across DMS, ERP and portal. Esch & Pickel contributes the systems and the process knowledge at the customer, MR.KNOW the no-code BPMN 2.0 platform.
The essentials about digital workers and the potential analysis.
A digital worker is neither a chatbot nor a single script, but a modelled process: it recognises a situation, decides based on rules, executes, produces documents and escalates to a human where needed. MR.KNOW distinguishes three levels — Digital Assistant (rule-based on BPMN 2.0), Digital Agent (AI-powered, also handles unstructured data) and Digital Worker (autonomous AI orchestration across system boundaries).
You upload a job description, job ad or specification sheet as a PDF, or enter the text directly. Tasks, workflows and the achievable degree of automation are analysed; you receive the assessment by email, usually within a few minutes. The analysis is free and without obligation.
A phased approach has proven itself: a compact discovery workshop, from it a working pilot for one concrete use case, then the rollout to further sites or tenants. The first productive use case takes weeks rather than months, because it builds on a platform that already exists.
The benefit is twofold: manual effort drops, and so do error rates and lead times. What decides the business case is reuse — most of the effort goes once into the base of data connectivity, extraction and the rule and document engine. Every further digital worker is largely configuration and therefore costs a fraction of the first one.
Processes are documented and versioned, prompts are managed in a vault, and the AI models are interchangeable — there is no vendor lock-in. Operation is GDPR-compliant and multi-tenant, either as a highly secure SaaS cloud or on-premise in your own data centre. Decisions therefore remain verifiable, which is an advantage in audited environments.
No. The BPMN 2.0 orchestration sits above your existing systems and integrates ERP, CRM, HR systems or specialist applications via open standards, APIs and connectors instead of competing with them. That protects existing investments, regardless of how individual vendors evolve.
No. Digital workers take on the recurring routine share that ties up experienced staff — around the clock and without fluctuations in quality. They close gaps caused by the skills shortage rather than cutting jobs.
Esch & Pickel is an IT system house in Koblenz, Germany, with more than 35 years of experience in document management, ERP and digital portals for mid-sized companies – plus the system landscape at the customer and the knowledge of the commercial processes running in it. MR.KNOW supplies the no-code BPM platform based on BPMN 2.0, the digital workers and their operation. The digital worker orchestrates the processes across DMS, ERP and portal rather than adding yet another system beside them.
