Transforming expense management for a leading confectionery and beverages firm with SAP Concur
Company Profile
The client is an American multinational company and one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world with over 125 years of excellence in the industry. They hold an industry-leading market share with over 44% of the U.S. confectionery market. Their product offerings include a wide variety of food products which are chocolate and candy based including chocolate & white crème candies, groceries, baked snack products, beverages and many more.
The client was looking for a partner to help them extend their expense management process across three major countries in Europe namely UK, Germany, and Switzerland.
Business Challenges
The client had an automated expense management system for their US geography but their reimbursement process in Europe was manual with their expense filings and approvals being carried out on excel sheets and emails. This resulted in huge delays that were affecting their business and the manual data entry process was prone to a high risk of incorrect expense filings. The client also faced trouble tracking filed and unfiled expenses with no innovative reimbursement system in place. Additionally, handling corporate card transactions and foreign currency proved to be quite challenging with the manual process.
To overcome all these challenges, the client decided to set up an effective and streamlined travel and expense management process with SAP CONCUR and chose Applexus as their partner for the implementation.
Client
Chocolate manufacturer
Solution
SAP CONCUR
At a glance
The client needed help to extend their reimbursement process across three major countries in Europe namely UK, Germany, and Switzerland. Applexus partnered with the client to implement end-to-end SAP CONCUR processes, designed an out-of-pocket expense and credit card process at three major locations in Europe, and simplified the reimbursement process.
Partnering with Applexus
Applexus brought in a seasoned project manager to re-baseline the entire project that was being handled by a 3rd party contractor. As the initial step, the project scope was frozen along with the timelines to be adhered to. An experienced and competent team was deployed to implement end-to-end SAP CONCUR processes for the client. Our expert team of consultants astutely designed an out-of-pocket expense and credit card process at three major locations in Europe and simplified the reimbursement process to align with their system in other geographies such as the US and Canada. Applexus also designed and implemented an easy and efficient method to handle expenses made using corporate cards in Europe. Additionally, a streamlined overall testing management was put in place by the Applexus Quality Engineering team including the roadmap, strategy, test plans and use cases to ensure a smooth Go-Live.
By having an able team and applying best practices, Applexus transformed the client’s existing manual reimbursement process with SAP Concur to deliver significant business value to the client.
Benefits Delivered
- Transformation from manual operation to an efficient automated expense management system with SAP Concur.
- Standardization of expense management across all geographies leveraging a global template.
- Reduced manual intervention while providing an optimum user experience.
- Reassigning critical resources who were earlier deployed on expense reimbursement data entry and follow-ups to more high value-add areas.
- Cost savings due to documented receipts and expense reporting to prevent fraud and misuse.