With more than 350 people working in Gurgaon and Mumbai office, BEUMER India is a manufacturing company with expertise in designing intralogistics systems for conveying, loading and distribution processes. The company’s employees, due to their nature of work (remotely and on-field) had regular travels to be taken care of. Before automating the process, employees of BEUMER India were using traditional formats like excel sheets and hard copy documents in order to record their travel logs, travel expenses and claims for reimbursements. Such a process was not only time-consuming for the employees but also created hassles for the finance department in keeping a track and analysing the data for further business insights. 

Keshav Dubal, IT Head of BEUMER India explained the process — considering the whole process of expense management was earlier done manually on an excel sheet, and via emails, the process of analysing the data used to take a huge amount of time for the finance department.

The company was urgently looking for an automated, digital expense management solution in order to meet and ease their requirements. An efficient travel and expense management solution became crucial for the business, which could improve the efficiency of the process and omit out the loopholes and glitches that could potentially be created due to manual intervention.

The Solution

The company required an advanced travel and expense tool that can automatise the whole process and can help the company to have a single dashboard view of their employees’ travel and expenses. BEUMER India decided to partner with SAP Concur, which is a software-as-a-service company specialising in designing travel and expense management solutions for its customers. 

The company Concur Technologies was acquired by SAP in 2014, and since then, SAP Concur has been working towards creating seamless travel and expense management solutions. Beumer India decided to opt for SAP Concur solution, however, with a high level of customisation according to the company’s requirements.

SAP Concur travel and expense management solution has been designed to automate the process of reimbursement, which proactively manage the employee spends with accounts payable automation, and help companies to have all their data in place to obtain business insight. According to SAP Concur, the travel and expense management is a one-stop solution, which integrates travel and expense processes of the customers and provides real-time visibility into different types of company data.

The cloud solution helped the customer make a smarter data-driven decision with complete data of employee spend. Alongside providing data to the customers, the solution also flags policy compliance violations and provides simplified budgeting for the company.

Benefits

The advanced travel and expense solution automated the company’s recording and reporting process of travel claims, which, in turn, saved a lot of time and effort for the finance department. Besides, the solution completely omitted the majority of human intervention in the process of managing travel expenses. Apart from these, the solution has been designed extremely employee-friendly, accurate and smart, which helped in increasing the control and visibility of the company’s travel and expense reporting. 

Also, within six months of deployment, the company could see a drastic improvement in their travel expenditure. Not only the solution streamlined the process, but because of its high regulatory compliance, the company managed to save approximately 2.5% of their spendings.

Apart from saving the employee’s significant time in filing the claims, the solution also provided a single dashboard view for all the related data. Additionally, SAP Concur also provided a mobile-based application for the company, which was designed only for the on-field employees and the employees having regular travels, to submit their claims online without any delays.

Additionally, Mankiran Chowhan the Managing Director – Indian Subcontinent, SAP Concur, said that the T&E management solution had been designed to help their customers manage their employee spend. “Such solutions would enable them to simplify their processes, gain visibility to spend data, establish control and compliance, make smart decisions and enhance employee experience all at the same time,” said Chowhan.

She further added, “We are delighted that just like BEUMER India, using our solution, organisations can make strategic decisions based on insights and the consolidated view of their budget.”

Post the implementation; the company realised that the workflows have become smooth, and it has become way easier for the finance department and administrators to check the details of the employees. The solution has helped the company in saving approximately 30% in terms of time and productivity.