2024 SAP Concur Innovation Award Winners

At SAP Concur Fusion we bring together customers and partners who share our passion for rethinking what’s possible together. Every year we showcase achievements through the SAP Concur Innovation Awards, celebrating customers and partners who use SAP Concur solutions to improve their company, culture, and employee experience.

The 2024 Innovation Award winners have driven automation and integration into travel and expense. They have reimagined expenses processes, eliminated tedious tasks, and developed new ways to sharpen visibility into spend. This year we are honoring seven Innovation Award winners who have shown they are ready for anything.

Bechtel

With the roll out of NDC, Bechtel travelers did not have access to the full range of content needed to secure the lowest applicable fare as required by its travel policy.

Bechtel needed to make NDC content available to its travelers before it was available in the Global Distribution System (GDS without interfering with other travel program requirements including policy enforcement and management, and Duty of Care reporting.

Using Concur Select Access powered by Travelfusion, and working with an airline partner and its TMC, Bechtel built a pilot program giving travelers the ability to view NDC content side-by-side with fares from other carriers coming from the GDS.

This pilot program reduced out of channel direct bookings improving the company’s Duty of Care reporting capabilities and allowed Bechtel to realize savings on airfares and ancillary services including wi-fi and additional bags.

Uber

With the company’s rapid growth, Uber’s expense organization saw an opportunity to streamline and automate its work to better deliver for employees without expanding headcount.

Using Concur APIs, Uber for Business functionality, and home-grown automation solutions the team reduced several bottlenecks including a chat bot to help employees finalize expenses by attaching receipts and adjusting expense time and help desk automation that helps employees quickly resolve support tickets.

Through thoughtful automation Uber has been able to save more than 5000 employee hours, automate the resolution of more than 70% of expense-related help desk tickets and drive corporate card adoption rates above 90%. Learn more in the Uber Customer Story Video.

KUKA

KUKA’s mission is to make life and work easier and that means building a cloud first strategy, always looking for SaaS solutions that provide a simple experience for their employee.

With most employees based in Germany where tax regulation is complex, submitting hotel and entertainment expenses was anything but simple. Employees were forced to itemize expense reports with the appropriate tax rates for every line item, which was time-consuming, complicated, and frustrating for the users.

The KUKA team – from tax, IT, HR and Travel among others – worked together to develop a simple process, connected to their SAP ERP, that allows employees to create hotel and entertainment expenses seven times faster with fewer errors and fewer rejected expense reports. Learn more in the KUKA Customer Story Video.

Stellantis

Following a series of mergers and acquisitions, the Stellantis team had to find a way to connect dozens of different finance, HR, and payroll systems across more than 30 countries. Expense reimbursement could take up to six months and use of corporate credit cards was limited because of weak expense reporting and reconciliation process.

By adopting Concur Travel & Expense, Stellantis was able to establish a flexible, scalable template and best practices that could be rolled out across the globe. A single, global T&E Governance Team based in Italy now manages end-to-end T&E process in 30 countries, with 98% of Stellantis employees covered by Concur Expense.

Cost controls and compliance increased dramatically and more than 20 credit card providers are connected to Concur with a strong reconciliation process. The company estimates it has saved more than one million euro by adopting SAP Concur solutions.

PETRONAS

As part of PETRONAS’ digital transformation, the company is focused on adopting solutions that provide a positive experience for its employees. Moving from an on-premise SAP expense management solution to cloud-based SAP Concur solutions has allowed the company to deliver a single travel and expense platform to support its global presence without compromising user experience.

The new process makes it easier for employees to complete travel bookings and submit expense claims – saving more than 30 minutes per transaction – and allows approvers and the finance team to finalize and process payments more quickly. The company estimates it has reduced travel and expense costs by more than 20% and the travel and expense program is now able to pursue more environmentally friendly, sustainable practices. Learn more in the PETRONAS Customer Story Video. 

neylux

Our Partner Innovation Award winner is neylux, a company that has been working with AP Concur and its customers since 2016. neylux is committed to bringing cloud technologies to our joint customers and the company’s neylux Connector integrates with SAP Concur solutions and helps move customer-owned processes to the cloud.

neylux and SAP Concur share a commitment to customer success and our Partner Innovation Award winner brings deep expertise in helping our customers deploy the latest cloud technologies. Learn more in the neylux Customer Story Video. 

Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited

Established in May 2015, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited (ABFRL) is a leading fashion conglomerate that operates more than 4,000 stores. To keep up with its rapid growth, the company sought to optimize its retail store reimbursement system to improve scalability, automate manual processes and create operational efficiencies.

While employee expense claims are a standard use case for SAP Concur solutions, using it for retail stores expenses was ‘out-of-box’ innovation that ABFRL adopted to enhanced efficiency in invoice and payment processes.

The successful roll-out across its retail stores increased spend visibility, improved financial practices and audit compliance, and ultimately led to 94% claim approval within seven days of submission.

We are proud these organizations have found success with SAP Concur solutions and it is an honor to recognize each as a 2024 SAP Concur Innovation Award winner.