Ramesh, currently the Managing Director at Concur Technologies India, comes with 25 years of experience in the industry. He has been successful in managing many challenging profiles / roles in Telecom and Information Technology ranging from owning the P&L of large business unit operations to handling sales, business development, product, marketing and program & project management.

The digital evolution is enabling organizations in a manner never seen before – accelerating innovation, sharpening decision making, scaling up operations and overall changing the way businesses engage with stakeholders. Traditional ways of doing business is under severe threat now than ever before. Business landscape is changing faster than the rate of internal change in many organizations. This presents an opportunity for those organizations that are nimble, agile and leverage technology for process and business transformation. Trying to drive an organization at greater speed without digitally enabling employees and without transforming customer and employee facing applications will lead to employee fatigue, errors, customer dissatisfaction and poor business results.

In this context, injecting the digital mindset into an organization’s DNA is perhaps the number one priority for a new world CEO. As First Citizen of a digital enterprise, it is important to identify the bottlenecks that hinder growth of business. It is natural that over time, many parts and processes of an organization have become redundant, thereby causing organizational dysfunction. A learning and alert organization, will proactively identify such areas and initiate suitable re-engineering measures and also carry out a periodic technology refresh.

So, which area gives maximum bang for the buck for CEO, CFOs, CIOs, CHROs and the likes? Which application has a major impact on business productivity and employee morale? The answer is increasingly becoming obvious these days - it is ‘Travel and Expense’ (T&E) application. For most organizations, T&E is the second largest controllable expense, which incidentally also has the maximum impact. However, many organizations are still using manual processes which involve tedious tasks like form fillings, using multiple excel sheets for claims and reimbursements. These processes are prone to errors which can have an adverse impact on the organization. As per Concur report titled, “Asia’s Journey to Optimized Travel and Expenses Management”, only 13 percent of the Indian companies have deployed an automated T&E system. This implies that only a select group of enterprises are currently enjoying benefits from visibility, compliance, reporting, mobility, business intelligence and real-time control.

Cloud based, mobility-enabled, secure T&E solutions bring with it abundant benefits that help the organization, however small or big to streamline the processes and
save costs.

Automation & Visibility:
Automation allows businesses to get ahead of traditional expense management processes that use pen and paper. It eradicates the factors contributing to compromised expense claim submissions and results in no delay in finance processes. Automation further empowers CFOs with holistic visibility of all expenses and to gain actionable insights that enable companies to stop bad spend decisions before they happen and to manage, plan and forecast more accurately right at the beginning.

Focus on Mobility & Analytics: Automated T&E management system allows CFOs to provide a tool to the employees to submit expenses using mobile devices on-the-go and to process expenses faster and increase convenience remarkably. This also frees their valuable time spent on expense claims towards month end and benefit in gaining work productivity. IDC found that employees complete expense reports 50 percent faster while using a mobile solution. As a step further, mobility is a source of data which with the help of analytics empowers, CFOs with insights for superior decision making. For instance, the data gathered by the solution about the travel bookings give CFOs an upper edge while negotiating with vendors for better prices.

Cloud: SaaS or Cloud-based solutions are easy to manage and low risk. With a cloud-based solution, there are minimal implementation costs and these can be recovered quickly through the savings. Importantly, Cloud-based solutions are immediately scalable to support business growth. They are also flexible when it comes to interfacing with other solutions such as accounts payable and payroll.

Compliance: Non-compliant and inefficient spend can be caused due to various reasons such as lack of visibility, unstructured and poorly communicated spend policies, purchases via untied vendor, errors in data entry and intentional employee fraud. Adopting automated T&E management process ensures that CFOs have a holistic view of all the possible outlets of spend. This in return provides an in depth understanding of where the expenses are made and suitably help make effective compliance policies. According to IDC, there was a 34 percent jump in compliance level among Concur clients after using Concur’s automated platform.

The digital world has gifted organizations with the option to step up their game, to stay ahead of competition. This viable offering manifests in the form of technology and there is a solution to address a prominent source of cost and hassle for the company. Whether you are looking for cost savings, time saving or compliance risk reduction, an integrated Cloud-based travel and expense solutions can help. Your solution is here, and the time for implementation is now!