Experience Matters
No matter the industry, segment, or market, business is anything but usual right now. And as organizations work their way through the new reality, they’re finding new ways to tweak their systems, adjust policies, and focus their time. Organizations are tweaking expense policies and systems because more employees work from home. Now’s the time to define how your organization will respond to this new reality. A key to your continued journey of digital transformation is employee experience.
A better employee experience is good for business. Companies that create exceptional experiences for employees see exceptional results – boosts not just in productivity, but also revenue, retention, and customer satisfaction.
But creating an experience requires evaluating every process and tool that affect your employees…and designing them for your employees – like how you manage travel and spending.
Plus, it takes an accurate understanding of the risks, rewards, and requirements to make a process like travel and expense management work. Especially as...the way we work, where we work, and how we travel (to get our work done) is constantly changing.
A world of Change
When we think about employee experience in the context of travel and expense management, it’s important to remember the ultimate goal of these processes. And it’s all about controlling costs. It’s about ensuring what’s budgeted is used in the best possible way. It’s about ensuring every bit of spending is going where the business needs it to go.
And as “how we work” changes, it’s about making sure processes and systems can keep up and keep employees and their spending accountable. But why is this control so complicated right now?
First, as you see here, the vast majority of fraud incidents organizations see aren’t the result of some complex financial scheme. They’re due to mistakes and errors and, of course, the occasional intentional misuse of company resources. So fraud – intentional or otherwise – happens and happens quite frequently. And it’s reasonable to conclude the mistakes are more likely to happen when the process – the experience – is complex and cumbersome.
Second, even as companies begin bringing employees back to their offices, we know work from home is going to become the norm for an increasing percentage of us. In fact, a Global Workplace Analytics study suggests more than half of employees could end up working from home regardless of the pandemic or other outside factors. So processes and systems must create an experience that works for those working from home and still affords cost control and protection for the business.
And finally, cash flow is always king. For many organizations, the process of managing AP constrains cash as much as their actual financials. Workflows and mechanisms to process invoices and expenses often force AP teams to spend countless hours tracking down and confirming POs and payments, dealing with exceptions, and more. As a result, cash flow is affected because it’s difficult to predict and plan for what’s going out as revenue comes in. Again, the experience of managing spending affects the business’ results.
Facing New Challenges
So in the wake of all of these challenges – when we know fraud or misuse is happening, when we know spending control is challenged by new ways of working, and when we know cash flow is critical – we see a lack of confidence in controls for business leaders.
In fact, 68% of finance leaders are not confident that employees comply with company spending policies. So almost seven out of 10 finance leaders don't feeling good about the systems they have in place.
Do you have the right visibility?
And to take that one step further. Virtually all – 82% -- of finance execs believe technology is critical to transforming processes like travel and expense management, but only 9% have access to real-time data, for example, to do financial analysis and planning.
The tangible benefits of a better experience
The good news is: all of these issues are addressable and solvable. IDC did an analysis of SAP Concur customers and how, by making the experience simple for employees and your finance teams, we can help the business transform and see the savings and spend control it needs.
IDC calculated tangible improvements in the experience for employees that SAP Concur delivers. In fact, SAP Concur users spend 78% less time booking travel and 60% less time filling out expense reports.
Also, compliance goes up – with 94% of transactions meeting travel and expense policies.
And customers see an average of almost $2M in savings.
But the benefits don’t stop there. Because SAP Concur empowers your end users...business travel is booked easier, expense reports are filed faster, and invoicing is more efficient. Plus, back-office staff can more efficiently reimburse employees, and process trips and pay out vendors quicker. At the same time, auditing staff get faster access to the financial data they need to do their jobs.
SAP Concur helps deliver powerful business results.
