Technology and innovation will emerge as powerful change enablers on the road to recovery as corporations shift focus towards digital transformation.

While companies across the world grapple with reduced costs and increased efficiencies, slow business travel has highlighted certain areas that can potentially undergo qualitative changes to help achieve cost and efficiency goals.

At Amadeus, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey finance, procurement, travel management, IT and HR leaders across large enterprises to explore the current state and challenges with Travel and Expense (T&E) management processes and tools. The survey revealed that enterprises need to rethink their T&E technologies to digitally transform, improve employee experience, and enhance the efficiency of financial operations through automation and integration.

However, every department had a different opinion about the management of travel and expense and its transformation. In this blog, we look at their challenges and objectives.

Finance

Seventy-three percent of finance and accounting leaders agree that improving T&E tools and processes is the key to their firm’s digital transformation; 70 percent believe that it is critical to improving employee engagement. However, 27 percent feel that the difficulty in building a case internally for its enhancement, lack of support from management and less time and resources to make improvements are the top barriers. Twenty-six percent of the finance leaders feel that the top challenge is the low speed of existing tools and processes as they take time to submit expense, approvals and related documentation.

While they are least satisfied with the level of automation and integration in their T&E management tools and processes, their top priority initiatives are to meet industry standards. Sixty-six percent of the leaders feel that increasing automation and reducing manual tasks would help, while 64 percent think enhancing and integrating the system would improve the ability to gain actionable insights from analytics in T&E management. They want a tool that can handle multiple workflows for approval, automate travel or expense policy violation notifications and bring visibility on receipts via photo capture features.

Procurement

Similar to finance leaders, 82 percent of procurement leaders agree that improving T&E management tools and processes can enable their firm’s digital transformation and 78 percent think it is critical to improving employee engagement. They consider the top challenges with current T&E management to be the lack of a global solution for all entities and the amount of time taken to submit/approve/document expenses. Twenty percent criticize the inability to manage travel compliance and the number of inaccuracies they have to face due to human error. Procurement too faces a lack of support from management for changes or improvements; however, 21 percent state that there is an insufficient budget for technology investment in the firm.

Unlike finance, about 80 percent of procurement professionals are least satisfied with the level of automation in current T&E management tools and processes, and the level of integration with other enterprise systems. The top priorities for them are to improve the end-to-end experience of the processes and get actionable insights from analytics, especially when it comes to visibility of existing and expected travel spending. Apart from data analytics and reporting, the top functionalities that procurement leaders want out of their integrated T&E management tool are ease of making changes or cancellations on existing bookings and receipt capture from the email inbox.

Travel Managers

The key challenges for travel management leaders with their current T&E management systems are compliance-related expense tracking, reconciliation and auditing. Twenty-three percent of professionals feel that there is a lack of a global solution for all entities. Nearly one in four say that they are dissatisfied with the ease of use and level of automation and feel that the current ERP software makes it difficult to improve with no solutions in the market that fit their needs.

While 72 percent of professionals believe that improving T&E processes is the key to their strategy, they want an integrated, automated and analytics-driven product. Procurement leaders say that the most critical functionalities for them to take up improved T&E management systems are relevant and comprehensive comparable content as well as automated policy violation notifications.

IT

As compared to finance, procurement and travel management leaders, the percentage of IT leaders agreeing to improve T&E management tools and processes is low at 67 percent. Interestingly, their challenges are also on a different plane; for example, 34 percent feel that privacy and security is a major area of concern in the existing tools, coupled with low analytical capabilities and more manual processes. IT leaders believe that their business units resist changes and there is a lack of skills and tools for greater automation.

While a quarter of them are not satisfied with the overall technology and process, the top T&E management priority initiatives for IT leaders are upgrading to best-of-breed technology solutions, improving the end-to-end experience, and integration between T&E tools and other ERP systems. Since they look deep into the technological aspect of solutions, they want their integrated T&E management to have an intuitive user interface, top-of-the-line analytics/data reporting capabilities and VAT calculations.

Human Resources

The report revealed that 72 percent of HR leaders agree that improving T&E tools and processes is critical to improving employee engagement. This is because their current T&E management tools have low speeds and processes, increased manual processes, poor customer support and there is an overall lack of clarity on policies. HR leaders believe that by improving the ability to gain actionable insights, they can positively impact the end-to-end experience of T&E processes, ensure digital tools empower employees who travel often, implement duty of care, and improve the productivity and engagement of employees.

While automated policy violation notifications and intuitive user interface are the primary wants of HR leaders, they are riddled with lack of top-management support for changes and difficulty in building a case internally to improve the technology.

Despite different views of departments within the organizations, the top business objectives over the next 12 months were to increase efficiency in operations, accelerate their digital transformation, and improve the experience of employees. The report highlighted that modernizing T&E management is critical to achieving these business objectives.

Find out more about the top 10 findings of the report or click here to download the full report.

Nadia Yahiaoui - Vice President, Corporations, Asia Pacific, Amadeus