2022 SAP Concur Innovation Award Winners

Today in Orlando at SAP Concur Fusion, we recognized our 2022 SAP Concur Innovation Award winners. These SAP Concur customers exemplify innovation and use our solutions to help them focus on the pivotal moments that make their business run best. We are happy to share the stories of our six 2022 Innovation Award winners who demonstrate a passion and commitment to innovation.  

Infineon 

As part of its digital transformation process, in 2016 Infineon started to digitize its travel management process with the goal of improving user experience while reducing operating expenses. 

But after implementing SAP Concur solutions, and as travel compliance rules have become more complex, Infineon recognized its compliance processes required employees to re-enter most of their travel data. This was not only a poor employee experience, but also had potential for errors. 

To solve this, Infineon set out to integrate a risk assessment check into the concur workflow. The company custom-designed a risk assessment engine and using SAP Business Technology Platform as an extension suite, results of the risk assessment are given to the travel requestor and approver in real time in Concur Request so any critical issues can be addressed before travel.  

IDP Education 

IDP Education specializes in combining human expertise with their leading digital platform to help students pursue overseas education and get accepted into their ideal study abroad program. As much as IDP focuses on innovation and technology, its sharp focus on digitalization did not extend to IDP’s purchase to pay processes, which were being handled manually and used different systems in different countries.  

Now, with the integrated solutions of SAP Ariba and SAP Concur, coupled with Concur Invoice Capture, approximately 70% of IDP invoices are processed by a simple email to capture service including an audit trail to view invoice and expense trends. What used to take two or three weeks for an invoice to be processed, has now been reduced to a mere three or four days.  

With the invoice process fully automated, the team spends less time on manual activities greatly increasing efficiency. 

NTT DATA Philippines 

NTT DATA Philippines is an SAP Concur partner providing subscriptions, implementation and consulting services, and this year’s Partner Innovation Award winner. 

When one of the largest bottling companies in Asia approached NTT DATA with their SAP Concur implementation project on what seemed like an unrealistic timeline, the NTT DATA team took the challenge head on. Starting in November 2020, NTT DATA quickly mobilized a project team to support the customer’s complex workflow design requirements, gathered details for the design workbook and quickly created a standard design workflow. 

Ultimately, the NTT DATA team helped its customer roll-out SAP Concur solutions to more than 2000 users in just 3 months cutting the finance team’s processing time on expense reimbursements from 5 days to 2 days. The team has approximately saved 1 FTE headcount cost by moving from manual expense to Concur Expense. 

Ocean Network Express

Ocean Network Express is a joint effort of three leading Japanese shipping companies with operations in 106 countries. When selecting a T&E solution, Ocean Network Express’ main concern was to provide an excellent employee experience and make the process seamless for travelers. It was also looking to standardize its travel and expense policies and processes globally.  

Ocean Network Express undertook a site review working with Concur Select Care and was able to consolidate its existing 74 active policies down to 8.  

In addition, Ocean Network Express has started to roll out more solutions such as Concur Budget and Concur Travel along with TripLink, and pilots have started in selected countries. It is also planning to roll out eBunsho and Japan Public Transport which allows the company to comply with the latest regulations while also providing convenience for its Japanese employees.  

Dover Corporation

Dover Corporation was running seven different instances of SAP Concur in North America and Europe which limited the company’s ability to monitor and control spend, implement automated processes, and create a unified employee experience. To solve this, Dover’s T&E team successfully consolidated down to a single instance of SAP Concur across 26 countries impacting 135 Business Units and over 12,000 employees worldwide. 

The impact was immediate. With a consistent configuration across all 26 countries, the company could extract reports to get a clear view of employee spend, T&E analysts roles shifted away from heavy data entry and now spend that time focused on using Concur Detect to audit expense reports and enforce the company’s T&E policy. 

In addition, Dover reduced travel bookings that are happening within 14 days of travel; Removed all spend within the miscellaneous expense type and increased card adoption to 95% for travel spend 

The Walt Disney Company 

Following its initial roll-out of SAP Concur solutions, The Walt Disney Company was able to reduce travel operating costs, reduce out of channel bookings and negotiate better rates with travel partners. With travel then down due to the pandemic, Disney’s T&E team was looking to build on these efforts. The team worked with SAP Concur Select Care to analyze its existing processes, ultimately resulting in reduced Travel Rule classes, a new Hotel Rate cap process and a streamlined approval process. 

In a challenging year, it is gratifying to see SAP Concur solutions help our customers adapt and transform their business and we are proud to have these great organizations as our 2022 innovation Award winners.