Client Success Stories

The problem

• Seven full-time employees required to manage heavy report volume
• Up to two months expense reimbursement time for field employees
• Non-compliance with existing expense policies
• Limited visibility into aggregate corporate spending patterns
• Disparate internal controls across business units

The solution

• Web-based, quick to deploy, robust functionality
• Policy-based, automated work-flow to streamline process
• Advanced reporting functionality to enforce expense compliance
• Embedded controls ensure consistency and compliance
• Fully integrated imaging service

The benefits

• Reduced headcount from seven full-time employees to 1.5 employees; process 500 reports a week average
• Slashed expense reimbursement time from 8 weeks to one week
• Significantly reduced the possibility of expense fraud
• Negotiated preferred vendor rates by leveraging expense intelligence
• Standardized internal controls for five business units
• All receipts are digitized and available in real-time

As anyone in the pharmaceutical industry will tell you, getting a new drug approved by the FDA is not exactly a rapid process. But for Applera, a life sciences company employing more than 5,000 people spanning the globe, that didn't keep them from doing their best to accelerate their own core internal business processes such as expense reporting.

"T&E expense reimbursement represents a significant line item on our balance sheet and we recognized that automating this process would save time and money," says Bob Mendence, project manager for Applera Corporation. "What we didn't realize is just how quickly we would see results – within just a few weeks we were able to reduce the number of dedicated headcount processing expense reports from seven to one-and-a-half."

Applera evaluated several best-of-breed expense management vendors and chose Concur® Expense Service Pro*. "One of the vendors we considered required us to run every configuration change back through their system which we quickly realized wouldn't scale."

Deploying Concur Expense Service Pro also proved to be a painless endeavor. Mendence notes that "we would have been up in 60 days but once management recognized the capabilities inherent in the system we knew we could accomplish much more than we previously thought possible. So we got creative." Applera realized they could further reduce costs and enforce tighter controls by integrating Concur Expense Service Pro with its in-house travel booking tool, TravelSmart, to unify all travel related expenditures through a single Web-based source.

Applera also recognized that further efficiencies could be had with Concur Imaging Service. "Our AP department is doing cartwheels – that's how excited they are about these new imaging capabilities. We now require that all receipts are imaged into the system. Employees love it as they don't have to worry about express mailing their receipts from the road and our AP department can now perform one-click audits without having to go digging through files."

Beyond the material savings Applera was seeking through automation lay another motivation: Sarbanes-Oxley. "Control and compliance were definitely contributing factors in our decision to automate the T&E reimbursement function. There was simply no way to document and test our controls in a manual environment. And as our management team remarked there would have been no way to even set it up."

By hard-coding Applera's travel policies into Concur Expense Service Pro, Applera has also succeeded in preventing expense fraud. Employees are aware that Applera now has tools to monitor spending patterns and are cautious about the types and dollar amounts of expenses they submit. "With a few clicks we can now bulk process everything, run reports, and within a few minutes see our corporate spending in aggregate or drill-down to a specific group or employee. It's hard to quantify that type of real-time visibility but it obviously impacts a wide range of business decisions."

With 600 field employees and managers often located a coast away from the employees they manage, the expense report approval process was protracted. "On average it would take eight weeks to reimburse field employees. We've since been able to reduce that to one week. We've also consolidated all of our employees onto a single corporate card enabling us to remit payment on their behalf. Not only do our employees love it, but it provides us with a birds eye view of our aggregate spending which we can leverage for business intelligence purposes."

But as with any new business process, the support that accompanies the first few months of service is critical. "By far, the most impressive facet of Concur Expense Service Pro is the service we've received from the Concur team," concludes Mendence. "The level of support and response time we've received has been truly exceptional."

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