Intelligent spend management can help address bottom line issues: Mankiran Chowhan, SAP Concur

SAP Concur is led by Ms. Mankiran Chowhan, MD, Indian subcontinent. She is responsible for providing strategic direction to the company's India business, as well as leading and providing guidance to sales, solution architecture, customer development, partner alliances and marketing teams. She is focused on helping customers drive digital transformation by leveraging cloud applications.

Here, she talks about the growth strategy of SAP Concur and how they are managing all types of spend in the current times. Excerpts:

DQ: What is the vision/focus area and growth strategy of SAP Concur?

Mankiran Chowhan: At SAP Concur, our core mission is to transform the way our customers manage spend and enhance user experience for their workforce. Our purpose is giving organisations more time and more money back. Simply put, our solutions allow organisations to harness the power of analytics and machine learning to automate spend management improving visibility, control, budgeting, real time decision making and compliance.

For more than 25 years, SAP Concur has taken companies of all sizes and stages beyond automation to a completely connected spend management solution encompassing travel, expense, invoice, compliance and risk. At the same time, we empower your organisation to take advantage of the cloud to get up and running quickly, access the latest updates and take the burden off your IT teams.

We are committed to understanding today’s travel and expense priorities; balancing compliance, safety, and productivity needs; making spend easy for employees; and creating the intelligent enterprise with a proven solution.

As part of the larger SAP family, and through our experience, expertise, and partnerships, our solutions help every business run at their very best. We believe n SAP’s vision which is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives.

We leverage the depth and breadth of data from our 66 million users to analyze behaviors and pinpoint trends enabling us to devise our strategy to support growth plans. As we move towards a cashless environment, digital initiatives have captured the imagination of a cashless economy thereby reducing our dependency on paper. In the corporate world, this could signal the beginning of a paperless culture.

Companies that have adopted electronic expense reporting have experienced a whopping 58% reduction in processing costs and greater RoI. Especially, keeping the current market conditions in mind, as we come out of the current travel restrictions having an automated and intelligent system that enables employees to book travel plans that are compliant and cost-efficient, manage expenses without having to keep track of paper receipts or fill out spreadsheets and gain approvals and in-turn reimbursements more quickly will become the need of the hour. No more collecting paper receipts, filling out paper expense forms and trying to get reimbursed.

Additionally, India has a fast-growing millennial Workforce (Digital Natives). Even across the globe it’s expected that by end of the year, millennials will form 50 percent of the global workforce. One of the defining characteristics of the millennial generation is their comfort with the digital world. They have grown up with broadband, smartphones, laptops and social media, and are accustomed to instant access to information.

This is a great opportunity for organizations to attract a younger workforce by providing them with good and efficient technology tools. This will also drive demand for intelligent spend management solutions, like ours.

DQ: How was the business performance in the year 2019 and what are plans for the current year?

Mankiran Chowhan: In 2019, SAP delivered strong underlying growth of 12% growth in total revenue, our highest growth rate since 2015 with Cloud revenue being major growth driver, growing 40%. SAP Concur along with SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass, represent SAP’s intelligent spend platform, the largest commerce platform in the world with over $3.7 trillion in global commerce annually transacted in more than 180 countries.

In the first quarter of 2020, SAP Concur segment revenue was up 14% to €428 million year-over-year. We provide travel, expense and invoice solutions to more than 46,000 customers in over 150 countries across the world.

In India, we started the year with a strategic partnership with HDFC Bank & Mastercard, that will enable Indian corporates of all sizes to reimagine the way they pay for, reconcile and manage company spending. To help facilitate this, HDFC Bank will be offering a corporate credit card for business travellers, providing a one-stop solution for payment and expense management during business trips.

The corporate credit card will enable seamless integration of all business-related spend into SAP Concur offerings, enhancing employee experience, increasing visibility, saving money, and improving corporate efficiency. The card is supported by Mastercard and is the first of its kind in the Indian market to address corporate business travel and expense spending.

In the current scenario, physical distancing is being promoted. Hence, physical transactions have declined severely including cash or cheque payments. Hence, digital payments have become even more relevant currently. SAP Concur solutions are focused on reducing the cash transactions and simultaneously capturing the digital payments that would remove the overhead of the finance department and provide for efficient spend management.

DQ: How can companies benefit from intelligent expense management and bring down their operational expenditure?

Mankiran Chowhan: In the light of the current situation, controlling spend has never mattered more. There is an increased urgency for organisations to ensure digital readiness considering an increasingly remote workforce and fears of a slowing economy that will bring pressure on businesses to do more with less.

As a result, more CFOs will steer their companies to calmer waters by improving visibility into corporate spend to better control budgets, and at the same time, ensure an increase in efficiency and productivity of their employees by replacing inefficient processes with automation and self-service tools.

Additionally, to manage the increased stress on cash flows, it is imperative to get up-front visibility and control of large purchases so that financial decision makers can understand how that will impact the budget and projections. In this scenario, purchase requests can be a powerful tool, particularly when integrated with budgeting tools to ensure that purchases are well timed and business critical.

With SAP Concur solutions, organizations can seamlessly manage their procurement of corporate travel, automate employee expense reports and streamline vendor invoice processing, all through one powerful cloud solution. We deliver rapid ROI by helping companies increase efficiency, provide visibility, control employee spends and drive down operational costs.

Our unique, end-to-end integrated approach offers a 360-degree view into all employee expenses, helping organizations globally enforce policies and monitor vendor compliance, while increasing control and visibility through valuable insight and actionable data.

According to an Oversight Systems 2017 Spend Analysis Report, the typical organization loses 5% of annual revenues each year to fraud. SAP Concur solutions increase policy compliance and decrease fraud by automatically applying spending controls and targeted audit rules to every transaction—wherever or whenever it happens. This removes the possibility of even accidental fraud such as mistakenly entering an expense twice or asset misappropriation.

SAP Concur has simple mobile tools that help employees get expense reports done quickly and easily. This prevents delayed expense reports from both affecting budget accruals and raising red flags with compliance reviews. This way, the overall productivity of the workforce is also improved by removing redundant and obsolete procedures. It also offers expert insight to help the business leaders interpret regulations and adapt to changing policies.

This way, intelligent spend management can help the companies in addressing issues that impact the bottom line.

DQ: How is SAP Concur implementing technologies like AI and ML to revolutionize travel and expense management?

Mankiran Chowhan: While submitting expense reports in SAP Concur, optical character recognition (OCR) combined with the power of machine learning can identify and understand data. Using this, the receipt pictures can be easily and automatically converted into completed expense reports. So, the expense report literally writes itself.

Add to that, leveraging AI we are capable of auditing every expense across any currency, any language, and every market where you do business. This helps bring consistency and efficiency to the process, while maintaining tighter control over spending. All without adding overhead. We also have solutions that can enable organisations to fulfil their duty of care and protect employees by staying aware of events and travel itineraries.

Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the Locate feature of SAP Concur can help in identifying risks, assessing their impact, detect the precise location of the employee, stay connected in real-time and deploy local response teams, if necessary.

At SAP Concur, we are working on advances in technology services that will increasingly anticipate your needs, whether they be related to expense reports, scheduling, or other processes. Eventually these services will do all or a portion of certain tasks, with more accuracy and speed than a human being.

For eg., your preferred travel itinerary may be suggested and filled out based on previous trips, and automatically combined with your company’s preferred vendor commitments. Concur’s solution ExpenseIt will ultimately predict the location of expenses based on the cities you visited, making the process of filling out your expense report even faster. All of this, and more, will be possible as ML fades into the background, thinking through elements of your work-life, and allowing you to put more of your effort into creative and productive tasks. It’s a trend that will bring more benefits in 2020 and beyond.