The Simple Life: How Arup Turned Complexity into Control
For any global organisation, complexity is a given – particularly when it comes to business processes, technology and spending policies.
Arup, a global design and business consulting firm, employs 16,000 staff in over 90 offices across 35 countries around the world. In the last few years, Arup has used SAP Concur spend management solutions to make life simpler, ride any rough waves and enjoy cost savings and productivity benefits that feed into every corner of the business.
As part of our “SAP Concur Conversations Podcast Series,” host Alistair Kent from SAP Concur catches up with Victoria Amis, Global AP Systems Manager at Arup and Sonia Blaudez, a Solutions Consultant at SAP Concur, to chat about the impact technology has had on Arup’s Accounts Payable (AP) processes.
Victoria has worked at Arup for ten years and recalls the days when AP was a paper-based, localised process, lacking transferability, tracking and visibility. As she discovered, when you have all your expenses and invoices in one platform, reporting becomes a walk in the park and the capabilities are endless.
Here’s just a snapshot of the benefits Arup has experienced.
Four Major Benefits of Automated AP processes
1.Visibility and insight into data
Automation allows you to go far beyond simple spreadsheets showing metrics, to gaining immediate insight into performance KPIs, spending trends and policy violation trends as they occur.
2.Save time and money
It empowers employees to review spend and block misspend before it happens, as well as speeding up your overall invoice, travel and expense spend management processes, leading to further cost savings.
3.Automatically reach sustainability goals
Offer employees the most sustainable options for the lowest environmental impact. For example, Concur Travel users can see the CO2 output of their proposed booking and get the opportunity to choose a lower impact option that’s more in line with company values.
4.Reduce overheads and eradicate bottlenecks
By centralising your AP departments, you reduce overhead costs and can easily conduct cost benefit analysis and reporting. Also identify pain points and bottlenecks by comparing processes and measuring staff efficiency.
Tips on a Smoother Implementation
Use SAP Concur certified implementation Partners
- Working with Partners means your solution rollout can be tailored to your maturity. If you need some extra guidance to completely analyse, deconstruct or revamp business processes or tackle supplier issues, our partners can help.
Adopt one standard approach
- Be sure of the direction you want to go in, use a standard template and try not to allow too many regional or country variations. This will significantly reduce the roll out time. The process gets quicker as more countries realise the benefits and actively start requesting automation rather than resisting changing.
Trust in the system
- Don’t try to build your existing manual processes into the new system – it’s a mistake and doesn’t work well. Remember that digitisation and automation are two different things. This is an opportunity to pause, open your mind, think about the constraints of your current system and work out what is going to work in the future.
Go at your own pace
- With SAP Concur solutions you can progressively achieve a broader business outcome within one platform as and when your business is ready. Because the products are modular, you don’t have to go through a “big bang implementation”, you can adopt a phased approach, bringing in Concur Expense, Concur Invoice, Concur Travel, Concur Audit or any other module, as they fit your business goals.
Gain Back Precious Time
Regardless of the benefits, any major change within an organisation will be met with some trepidation. It’s human nature. Arup soon realised how the changes would make each individual’s life easier, allowing them to concentrate on running projects, winning work and bringing more money into the business without worrying about attaching copies of pieces of paper to receipts or putting a signature on an invoice.
It’s that opportunity to change the way you work that makes automation both exciting and challenging. Organisations have a rare opportunity to pause, analyse any issues in their current systems and establish exactly what they want from a new solution.
As Victoria says, “Time is probably the most valuable asset to us all.”