Logoplaste Customer Story: A Fast Track to the Cloud

Open your fridge or bathroom cabinet in Europe or North America and chances are one of the bottles inside was designed and made by Logoplaste.

The plastic packaging company supplies the dairy, personal care, home care and food sectors, with clients including Heineken, Arla, Proctor & Gamble, L’Oréal, Danone and Nestlé. The family-owned company was founded in Portugal in 1976 and has over two thousand employees across 18 countries, delivering 600 million Euros in sales.

With three main delivery centres in Europe, North America, and Brazil, the company wanted to improve its spend governance and employee experience.

“One of our aims was to have everyone in Logoplaste submitting expenses and booking travel within the same policies, without any exceptions,” says Ana Jaques, global travel and solutions manager at Logoplaste, during a recent panel discussion webinar Learn How Logoplaste Accelerated Their Move to the Cloud with SAP Concur Solutions and Accenture.

Why SAP Concur and Accenture?

Logoplaste needed an easy and intuitive solution to replace manual processes and increase productivity; one that could streamline the workflow and offer cash control and policy compliance. “It was a very decentralised process without a clear, approval flow” explains Jaques.

Following research into multiple software providers, SAP Concur solutions were the only cloud solutions that could meet all their criteria. Accenture, a leading SAP Concur partner with a global presence, offered the much-needed knowledge about different countries and legal requirements in the travel and expense arena. Accenture Portugal SAP Concur Centre of Excellence, which already has 16 live SAP Concur projects, handled the Logoplaste implementation.

“Accenture showed its value right at the beginning with their knowledge of the solutions and their proactive approach” says Jaques. “But there are also the challenges that come up during projects and they were always able to find a solution for us in a fast way” she adds.

The Solution

Logoplaste took advantage of all the native integrations available in SAP Concur solutions, in particular SAP S4/HANA but also SAP Success Factors, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform, to make sure the solution fit Logoplaste’s unique requirements. Customisations included the addition of a digital archive folder for digital receipts. OANDA was used to handle exchange rates and the solution was integrated with the Travel Management Company (TMC) to help ensure all booking data was shared.

Initially, Accenture was briefed to focus on the Expense module, but this later grew to include the Travel module, including travel booking and expense reporting. “Underlying all these processes, we use Cognos which is a pre-offered reporting tool used to capture data from all these processes,” says José Moreira, SAP Concur Project Manager at Accenture. 

Global and Local Roll Outs

The solution was rolled out in two waves to 18 countries – a pilot roll out to Portugal, USA, Canada, Brazil, UK and Luxembourg in November 2020, followed by Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Ukraine and Vietnam in February 2021.

In phase one, a global template approach allowed for an accelerated roll out and had the clear benefit of process simplification for employees and administrators.

The template included: global travel and expense management policy rules; standardised expense management processes (including accounts payable); standardised expense types (e.g., hotel, airplane, car rental, taxi and public transport); standardised expense capture forms; consistent data capture in a single solution and standardised approval workflows.

“The global template is an asset we’ve developed over the course of the years that we've been working with implementations in different countries. It makes it easier to engage with the different projects” says Moreira. “We built a strong backbone first, then once in place it allows for a faster implementation and ensures global compliance.”

“For example, Mexico is a particularly complex country in terms of legal requirements, so we had to take advantage of these kinds of assets to streamline our implementation and to meet our time limits.”

In the second phase, the implementation moved onto the localisation and factors such as tax rules, personal car mileage allowance, travel allowances, and other legal or statutory requirements like reporting were considered.

Solid Results in a Short Time

In a very short time since implementation, there’s been a “huge impact” on Logoplaste’s expense reporting, according to Jaques, with already over 1000 users and more than 1000 expense reports.

“As you know, we have a travel ban in place, so I think for a company with 2000 employees it’s a big achievement” she says.

Further results show that the time between expense preparation and payment is now less than 11 days on average and 11 of the 18 countries are using an exclusively digitized process, which means zero paper.

Travel process times have also sped up, as travel invoices are now all submitted through the expense report. Other features of the solution include a cash advance functionality and expense error monitoring. “Because it’s automated it’s much easier to check for errors than using paper receipts and Excel spreadsheets” says Ana.

Users are also loving the SAP Concur mobile app, which allows them to photograph their receipts and, using OCR technology, submit an expense report whilst still on the road.

Customer Approval

With a reported user rating of 4.3 on a scale between 0 and 5 already, it’s safe to say the move to the cloud has been a huge success.

“Accenture and SAP Concur have shown that we can deliver complex projects in a complex world situation” says Gregory Cotti, director, cloud channel sales, SI EMEA at the SAP Concur organization.

Jaques agrees: “Of course it’s hard to make these changes in this type of project, but with Accenture and SAP Concur solutions, we did it.”

You can listen to the full Learn How Logoplaste Accelerated Their Move to the Cloud with SAP Concur Solutions and Accenture webinar here.