Christopher Juneau, Senior Director Marketing – Australia & Asia-Pacific, Concur Technologies, talked to Harshal Kallyanpur about the need for a dedicated travel and expense management solution, Concur’s Cloud-based offering and its efforts in the Indian market
What challenges does the traditional way of travel requests and bookings pose for an enterprise?
Typically, it takes up to six days for someone to have a travel request approved. It takes about five days to process this request while it takes an additional two days to correct any errors in this process as most of it is manual. In those six days, air fares could increase by 10%. We interviewed about 576 companies doing 250 travel claims per month on average. With the number of people in a company making travel requests in a month, the 10% increase in air fare could cost these companies an amount that cumulatively, runs into crores. Furthermore, only 75% of these requests and travel bookings are compliant with the company’s travel policies.
While only 50% of the organizations doing travel expenses the manual way could ensure compliance with their travel policies, this number increases to 84% after automating their travel expense processes. With an automated process an expense claim can be completed in two and half days as opposed to five days with the manual process.
How does your solution address these issues?
From a traveler’s point of view it should be a single process. We have created that single process with our Cloud-based application. The application also provides reporting and analysis capabilities that can be used by managers to determine travel expenses and patterns for employees. The manager can approve travel for employees spread across offices in multiple locations and reimburse travel expenses for them immediately. The finance and accounting department can review the travel expense history for any exceptions and correct them.
Many of our customers have large ERP implementations in place. The tool integrates with all of the various ERP products through connectors. The points of integration are with the financial department for accounting and with the HR department for tracking employee travel records. We also have direct integrations with cloud services such as Salesforce.com such that information can be accessed in real-time from a Salesforce.com adoption by the company.
A lot of ERP solutions also offer this as an additional functionality. Why would an enterprise invest in a dedicated solution just for the travel and expense management function?
The time and speed to deploy our solution, with the incumbent ERP system, can be four weeks or less. We have seen many instances of deployments where a single company has deployed the solution for its multiple locations across the globe in less than six weeks.
On the other hand, though available as a modular extension to the ERP, travel and expense management solutions offered as a part of the implementations would take much more time to implement especially, if the ERP implementation is greenfield.
Speed to deployment is improved by introducing country specific templates that cater to the specific T&E scenario, like for instance the one in India. The solution is completely hosted and managed by us. The system is secure, it is ISO certified, SOX and PCI compliant and we also meet all personal data protection requirements.
You have a minority stake in Cleartrip. Could you talk about your focus on the Indian market and how is this association helping you in this region?
Globally we do expense management and travel bookings for 15,000 companies and we have 18 million travelers that use our system. We see up to $100 billion in travel related transactions being processed and manage over 100 million itineraries in a year.
We have hundreds of clients in India who have been using our services since 2001. We have made some significant investments over the last 15 months. These include the offices in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. We have opened up an R&D center in Bangalore and we will continue to invest all these locations and look at expanding in other cities in the country.
We currently have around 20 people in India. We specifically invested with regards to the solution we deliver in India. The whole idea of having an R&D center in India is to succeed globally, we must have local resources not just from a sales and marketing perspective, but to put development as close as possible to the market we are looking to tap. We had India specific templates developed since 2003, and it is this template approach that gives us the speed to implementation of four weeks.
We created the Indian R&D team with a focus to serve the entire APAC region. We like to keep our R&D resources as close to our key markets as possible and have R&D resources spread across in US, UK, Czech Republic, Prague, Manilla and Bangalore.
We have seen adoption across Manufacturing, BFSI and Pharma. While overall we are growing at a rate of 30% year-on-year, we expect to grow much faster than this in India.
Our association with Cleartrip, gives us access to low cost carrier content that helps us serve both the local and global clients. Globally, some of our competitors are also our partners. For instance American Express Travel or BCD Travel who support our travel booking tool for both Indian and other global clients.
