Sysmex

The Problem

• Attain greater control over $2.75 million travel expense annual spend
• Manual expense reporting process could not scale with planned headcount growth
• Average reimbursement schedule of three weeks under manual environment
• Lack of visibility into aggregate travel expense spending patterns

The Solution

• Embedded controls to proactively enforce travel expense reporting policy compliance
• Flexible system that could easily integrate with existing financial applications
• Quick to deploy, Web-based management system
• Intuitive user-interface to facilitate training

The Benefits

• Increased headcount 340% without having to hire additional support
• Processing the same number of expense reports in a third of the time
• Slashed expense reimbursement to a week and integrated into payroll
• Greater visibility of corporate spending combined with tighter internal controls

Sysmex America, Inc., (SAI) is the U.S. headquarters of Sysmex Corporation (Kobe, Japan), a leading international manufacturer of medical diagnostic systems. To help build market share, SAI has been adding to its headcount of field based service and sales associates, who submit detailed travel expense reports to be reimbursed for their business travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses. The addition of field associates created an increase in expense reports, which strained the company's manual expense processing system.

"We were still processing expense reports using an Excel spreadsheet and routing them, with receipts attached, to various managers for approval and then to accounting for reimbursement," explains SAI controller, Don Cox. "We knew we were growing. We also knew we had to increase our productivity with a better solution, most likely a Web-based product. We wanted to make the expense reporting process better for our internal customers, the employees who use the system."

SAI chose Concur® Expense Service Pro* a Web-based, automated travel expense reporting solution. Easy to implement, learn, and deploy, Concur Expense Pro securely and efficiently automates the work involved in creating, submitting, approving, and reimbursing SAI employees' T&E expenses.

Using a standard Internet connection, filers and their managers can access the system at any stage of processing, at any time, and from anywhere in the world. Concur's robust integration capabilities enable travel expense data to flow seamlessly into SAI's Accounts Payable and General Ledger systems — thereby expediting accurate reimbursements to employees.

SAI also benefits from powerful auditing capabilities and built-in reporting features that allow business managers to quickly assess expense trends. Because Concur Expense Service Pro is fully hosted, SAI's IT department does not have to worry about supporting another application.

T&E represents a significant expense for SAI, which maintains an extensive network of field-based sales and service employees. "We anticipate spending about $2.75 million on T&E in 2004," explains Cox, "so having an efficient, automated system in place is critical."

Control is key to expense management and the automated control mechanisms embedded within the online application aid the entire travel expense reporting process. For example, Concur Expense Service Pro automatically ‘flags' expenses that are out of compliance, allowing SAI approval managers and the accounting department to quickly and easily reference flagged items for closer review and follow-up.

SAI has also recognized tangible productivity gains that are being driven by Concur Expense Service Pro. Cox notes, "We are able to process the same amount of checks with fewer errors and in one-third the amount of time it took with our manual process." He adds, "Concur's service also interfaces with our back-end systems and is very user-friendly for our filers, supervisors and administrators. The e-mail notification feature is great for supervisors. We also enjoy the feature that automatically prepopulates corporate card information."

SAI has also enabled some value-added services for offline capabilities and receipt imaging. The latter feature is especially helpful because it brings visibility of the receipts back to the supervisor. In fact, the high level of satisfaction among report filers boils down to a single but very high profile metric: improved turnaround time.

Before using Concur Expense Service Pro, average turnaround time for reimbursement exceeded three weeks. With Concur's travel expense reporting service, most employees are typically reimbursed via direct deposit within a week of filing an expense report.

SAI views Concur Expense Service Pro as a strategic means of harnessing more of the power and functionality of the Internet to help the company attain its near and longterm cost containment goals. "Our total headcount growth is about 340% over the prior year," says Cox. "Yet with that expansive growth we have been able to process the increase in reports with the same resources but in less time and with fewer errors. That's productivity."

The features, functionality and benefits of Concur Expense Service Pro combine to deliver a powerful travel expense reporting solution that can be used by companies that have needs that are similar to SAI, says Cox. "I would recommend this service to other companies that have remote sites or employees who travel," he concludes. "It is easy to implement and easy to use."

*Sysmex is using a rebranded version of Concur Expense Service Pro called ADP Expense eXpert.