Reimagine Digital | Transform Now
Seamless travel and expense management
As part of its pursuit towards organisational excellence, a world-renowned university successfully implemented a cloud-based travel and expense management system, SAP Concur. With PwC’s support, the system focused on improving the user experience by streamlining processes and gaining better control and insights on spending across the university.
Client: Top university in Singapore
Our role: Travel and expense advisory, change enabler and system integrator
Industry: Higher education
Setting the scene
Our client is a world-renowned higher education institution with a long heritage. The flagship university is amongst Asia’s best and recognised for its influential research, innovative academic programmes and visionary enterprise.
As part of its culture of innovation and excellence, the institution embarked on a large-scale digital finance transformation journey with PwC. The goal was to progress to more modern, digital ways of working for an improved employee experience as well as adopting a seamless and intuitive user interface. The client wanted to implement SAP Concur, a cloud travel and expense solution with mobile and self-service facilities. The solution reduces workflow time and resources, improves timeliness and ease of submitting expenses while reducing overall administrative costs.
Challenges faced
The Singapore university had many faculties, schools, research institutes and centres which accumulated several customisations within the legacy system to accommodate the various needs. This resulted in an inefficient system that users deem difficult to navigate - one of the many pain points of the system.
While the legacy system was deemed difficult to use, employees were familiar with the processes. We had to consider user behaviour and change management strategies to empower employees with quick access to data, self-service activities and personalised reporting needs, augmented by a mobile application.
This meant designing and implementing a new travel and expense system with redefined workflows that optimise the university’s limited resources and with it, a new mindset to the way of working.
How we helped
PwC organised a visioning workshop to ensure alignment between the leadership team and the users on the project approach and outcome. We co-created the time and expense management system with the various faculties, schools, research institutes and centres through design workshops to capture the users’ requirements. In addition, the reports within SAP Concur augmented their risk and analysis capabilities.
A comprehensive communication and change management plan was created to help employees transit to SAP Concur. The plan included facilitating engagement sessions across 27 faculties and departments, training sessions for over 2,000 end users and developing self-help training materials to ease the remaining 12,000 employees into the new system.
Result and impact
The success was apparent in the improved user experience, more streamlined workflows, and the ease of transition to the new system.
The project achieved a 70% reduction in approval time thanks to the streamlined processes and workflows from the new time and expense management system. A post-implementation survey for SAP Concur showed that 94% of respondents were satisfied with the overall experience and 3 out of 5 respondents found the training session and materials useful.
“PwC have supported us as our trusted advisor … resulting in a well-executed solution that is able to blend in smoothly with existing and new policies, providing a huge boost to the end users.”
