How my team won the 2016 Concur Enterprise Innovation Award for APAC

As Head of Management Accounting at AHG, its my job to perform analysis across the business, highlight areas for improvement and to implement projects to capture savings and efficiencies.

As part of this role, I run a number of finance transformation projects including Accounts Payable automation, Procure to Pay and Travel and Expense management. While my project team is extremely lean, they have great project and industry experience from companies like Accenture and Chevron. The team consists of Luciano Albaytero and Chris Westcott (pictured below).

Luciano and Chris were recently awarded the 2016 Concur Enterprise Innovation Award in APAC for their outstanding implementation of the Concur Expense Management Platform.

Concur is a cloud based platform that allows employees to claim reimbursement for out of pocket travel expenses on the go via smartphone. The platform replaced our legacy paper based claim processes where employees would fill in a form listing their expenses and collect, staple and mail receipts to receive reimbursement.

Implementing Concur at AHG was an ambitious project and team is to be congratulated on their success. Below is an overview of the challenges they overcame.

Large and dynamic environment

AHG is a large, complex and fast growing company. As well as being the largest automotive retailer we are Australia’s largest refrigerated transport provider comprising the Rand, Scotts and JAT logistics brands.

AHG employs over 7,500 people and has acquired close to 20 companies over the past few years. So with this in mind, there is always scope to improve processes and find partners who can add value and support the growth of the business.

Complex technology stacks

AHG's portfolio of companies spans Automotive Retailing, Refrigerated Logistics, Manufacturing and other verticals which all have completely different requirements from their supporting technology stacks. Implementing a single user interface for travel and expense management that could interact with diverse technology layers represented a significant challenge.

Luciano and Chris were able to achieve a single consistent user experience through the Concur app and desktop site, seamlessly integrate with multiple accounting systems, automate transaction and tax entries and provide detailed reporting to accounting teams that was not previously available.

Diverse user cohorts

With such a diverse range of operations comes a diverse user base. From a junior sales representative to the Company CEO and Board, every employee needs to be able to access and complete an expense claim in an intuitive way.

Most of our T&E users are not accountants, therefore a balance needed to be achieved between a simple user experience when recording expenses and the required granularity to ensure accurate technical accounting was achieved.

Luciano and Chris have achieved this through a process of analysis and consultation, constantly monitoring which expense types are not being used and what concerns are top of mind in the accounting team.

Valuable insights

With a critical mass now on-boarded to the Concur platform, we are able to draw interesting and valuable insights regarding our Corporate Card and Travel & Expense programs.

Understanding the mix of transactions has allowed us to optimise card types between Travel, Expenses or Purchasing cards and explore the potential of more sophisticated products such as Virtual Cards.

By optimising the Corporate Card program with a critical mass of Concur users we have also been able to commence expense saving initiatives such as preferred supplier channels and policy enforcement. These savings are expected to trend higher as the roll out is advanced.

Final thoughts

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