“Management loves the ability to audit expense reports and the ease of use.”
- Company:
Liz Claiborne, Inc. - Implementation:
Concur’s unified travel and expense solution - Industry:
Retail - Company size:
14,000 employees
The problem
- Lack of structure around corporate travel policies
- Weekly, calendar-based expense system
- Employees required to manage paper expense reporting solution
- Manual processing of expense reports
- Separate tools for travel booking and expense reporting
The solution
- On-demand, end-to-end travel and expense management solution
- One-click functionality automatically pre-populates travel information in the expense report
- Audit feature automatically flags expenses that are not in compliance
- Automated pre-population and calculation of foreign exchange rates
The benefits
- Savings of nearly 80 percent per filed expense report
- Seamless expense reporting solution across all organizations
- Increase in policy awareness and compliance
- Ability to audit T&E throughout the entire company
- 100 percent employee adoption rate
- High employee and management satisfaction
Since 1976 Liz Claiborne, Inc. has been providing men and women with apparel, accessories and fragrance products. The company offers consumers quality brands for every lifestyle with wholesale and retail locations across the globe.
Being buried in a stack of unnecessary manual expense reports was enough to convince the leadership at Liz Claiborne, Inc. to evaluate their travel booking and expense reporting process. Their expense reporting method was paper-based, creating a constant flow of documents, both for business travelers and those processing reports. One of the main components driving this mass of paper was the company’s weekly, calendar-based expense reporting time-frame.
It went by week, so if somebody traveled three weeks in a row, there would be three expense reports for just one trip,” said Rafael Rosario, Liz Claiborne’s global travel services manager.
Not only did this labor-intensive process neglect to meet the needs of travelers, it also put Liz Claiborne at risk for leakage. Employees were failing to comply with corporate travel policies, but without a standardized expense system in place, no auditing or policy control was in effect for Liz Claiborne travelers. As a result, items such as airport lounge memberships were being expensed, costing the organization unwarranted amounts of money.
With more than 30 brands spanning three continents, Liz Claiborne was in search of a travel and expense management solution that was more universal and efficient than their paper-based process. The company was also in-need of a solution that would incorporate corporate policies to enforce employee expense compliance. One instance of service was crucial for Liz Claiborne, in order to serve its employees’ diverse language and business needs around the world.
With hopes of increasing compliance with its corporate travel policy along with a more efficient and effective expense reporting process, Liz Claiborne’s vision closely matched that of Concur® Travel & Expense, an end-to-end travel booking and expense reporting solution. Liz Claiborne looked to Concur’s unified service to streamline the entire travel and expense reporting process for the company. Using Concur’s on-demand travel booking and expense management solution, travelers within Liz Claiborne’s global organization can now access the solution anytime, anywhere – to both book their travel and submit their expense reports.
Since implementing Concur’s travel booking and expense reporting service, productivity has increased for travelers, as expense reports can now be filed on a per-trip basis, rather than a per-week basis. As a result, leadership at Liz Claiborne saw a significant decline in the amount of paperwork being shuffled between departments.
Employee compliance with corporate card policies increased to 90 percent since implementing the solution. Now, Liz Claiborne is able to prevent outof- policy transactions from taking place before they occur as a result of Concur’s consistent corporate policy enforcement. In addition, Concur enables the company to reimburse out-of-pocket expenses within 48 to 72 hours, rather than the nearly two weeks it took for reimbursement when Liz Claiborne used a manual travel and expense process.
“It gives visibility to the traveler,” Rosario said. “There is functionality in Concur called ‘one click’ that allows you to pre-populate all the information from the travel into the expense tool automatically.” Because Concur’s one-click functionality is easy to use and makes the end-to-end travel and expense process seamless, it encourages employee adoption of the online travel booking tool, which has gone from 50 percent to 82 percent after implementing Concur. This helps drive policy compliance, and it is this functionality, according to Rosario, that played a role in Liz Claiborne’s decision to implement Concur.
With Liz Claiborne’s overall increase of compliance, productivity and control, it’s clear that not only has Concur helped the organization save money, but the intuitive tools have also helped to increase employee satisfaction. The travel booking and expense reporting experience is now a much simpler process that requires less frequent expense reports. Concur’s end-toend service has helped Liz Claiborne truly take control of their corporate travel and expense management process.
“Concur has streamlined the travel booking and expense reporting process for us, increasing productivity with employees,” Rosario said. “Now, completing the expense reporting process is just a click away. Because of our success with Concur in the US, we’re rolling out the end-to-end solution in Canada and Asia right now, and are planning to roll out the solution in Europe in the future.”