Case study: ANSTO enjoys greater mobility, visibility and control of spend

Australian Government Research Organisation implements Concur for end-to-end travel and expense management and reporting, significantly enhancing user experience and overall compliance

ANSTO leverages great science to deliver big outcomes. ANSTO partners with scientists and engineers and apply new technologies to provide real-world benefits. ANSTO’s work improves human health, saves lives, builds our industries and protects the environment. ANSTO is the home of Australia’s most significant landmark and national infrastructure for research. Thousands of scientists from industry and academia benefit from gaining access to state-of-the-art instruments every year.

Why ANSTO choose SAP Concur?

Providing ANSTO staff with full mobility to manage their travel and expenses, and giving the organisation greater visibility into overall spend and improved compliance and control.

ANSTO case study

Australian Government Research Organisation implements Concur for end-to-end travel and expense management and reporting, significantly enhancing user experience and overall compliance

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Focus on ERP integration and user experience

Prior to implementing Concur, ANSTO was managing its employees’ spend with a separate module that was integrated with its SAP ERP system. However, while this system gave ANSTO’s finance team the automation and integration it needed for managing expenses, it didn’t provide ANSTO staff with a positive user experience.

With more than 300 active travellers and 500 expense claims submitted monthly, the usability of its travel and expense management system was having a significant impact on the organisation. The module had no mobility capabilities, there was no platform to link users’ receipts with their expenses, and users and managers had little control or clarity on the expense management process. Also, the system was difficult to customise and there was limited visibility on spend information which was creating some audit and compliance challenges for the organisation.

With a major SAP upgrade as the catalyst, ANSTO selected and implemented Concur Request and Expense to create a seamless, endto-end process from an employee’s travel request through to expense claim, audit and compliance control.

“ANSTO’s scientists, engineers, our managers and group executives, are often out in the field or out of the country. By having Concur’s mobile apps, they are able to do anything they need to do, on the go, and are not reliant on being in the office to complete travel and expense.” Janina Babaic, SAP Concur Administrator, ANSTO

CUSTOMISATION AND ONGOING ENHANCEMENT

ANSTO completed the implementation of Concur in six months, with the project including customisation to cater for ANSTO’s unique business requirements due to the work undertaken by its scientists and researchers. ANSTO also had a requirement to continually enhance and add functionality to the platform, so the organisation deployed a test site in parallel to production and is using Concur Service Administration to manage its support cases.

“Having the test site gives us a lot more flexibility. It means that we can make whatever changes we need to the system and test these before going into production. It’s not just to protect us from breaking the system, but also to make sure that the changes we make don’t have a negative impact on some other aspect of the business processes down the line,” said Janina Babaic, SAP Concur Administrator, ANSTO.

ANSTO has also been using Concur User Support Desk since going live with its new system. By having both Concur Service Administration as well as User Support Desk, ANSTO has been able to respond to user feedback, tailor the functionality and configure it so that Concur continues to meet the needs of ANSTO’s users.

“We use Concur Service Administration for all our support cases, which are usually to enhance our site. On our monthly calls with our Service Admin team, we share a lot of knowledge on our business processes and the Concur system, which benefits everyone.”

One of the key customisations configured in the system is the incorporation of cash advances into Concur’s travel request process. With staff often travelling to obscure or remote places as part of their research, cash advances are a necessity for ANSTO. As part of the travel request process, any required cash advances are associated with that user’s specific trip, allowing the Concur system to calculate the mandated daily allowances based on the status of the user, and whether or not they are a credit card holder. Cash is only advanced in Australian dollars, but if users return from their trip with foreign currency, that can be put back into Concur and processed accordingly. For the user’s trip reporting and expense claim, this ensures that users have met compliance requirements when everything is reconciled back to ANSTO’s ERP system.

SEAMLESS SERVICE AND COMPLETE MOBILITY

ANSTO has also deployed the Concur mobility app incorporating the ExpenseIt and Concur TripIt Pro mobility apps for its users, making the travel and expense process much more seamless and convenient.

“Our users love ExpenseIt. They love being able to take photos of their receipts on the go and add comments, reducing the need to bring back paper receipts. The OCR works and it matches to each credit card transaction. In the past, our users would come back from a trip, put together pages and pages of receipts, and create a scanned PDF to send through to finance, which made an audit nightmare for us to try and match all the receipts up to each expense line item,” said Babaic.

Combined with the rich data received via ANSTO’s credit card provider, there is now far greater visibility on users’ spending, making it much easier to audit expense claims. Users are now very aware of this greater visibility, ensuring higher levels of spending compliance and accountability. Users are also able to add comments to the system when they photograph each receipt, providing more context for each expense item.

ExpenseIt’s OCR capabilities are also helping to explain receipts and expenses when they are generated in other languages and scripts, particularly when cash has been used to make the purchase. ANSTO can use Google’s Translate service, or translation services provided by Concur Audit, if further detail is required for a specific expense item.

With Concur TripIt Pro, the user’s complete travel itineraries are available to users, and ANSTO has complete visibility as to the location of any staff, helping to fulfil ANSTO’s duty of care and generating alerts and advisories for travelling staff.

The combination of travel itinerary data and rich data on each expense item is helping ANSTO to quickly identify and more effectively manage fraudulent credit card activity.

Via TripIt Pro, users also receive immediate notifications of any changes in their travel arrangements, such as cancelled flights.

“The notification on changes in TripIt Pro are amazing. While waiting at the gate, I received a message that the flight had been cancelled – and what I needed to do. This was all before the flight attendants even knew.”

“Concur has impacted our organisation by allowing us seamless service, from a travel request through to approving an expense claim. By using Concur mobile apps we are able to do it all on the go. It all matches up and it’s the report that writes itself,” said Babaic.

On average, Babaic estimates that ANSTO saves about two days a week in Request and Expense processes by using the audit rules and tool tips. In savings, that equates to at least two FTE staff over a six-month period

SPENDING VISIBILITY AND COMPLIANCE

Using Concur Intelligence, ANSTO can build and tailor reports and create dashboards for its group executives so that they can have complete visibility on current and projected spending, in real-time.

“Our executives know exactly what’s outstanding and what’s real, so therefore they can do a real-world forecast of what they are expecting to spend. That allows budget control in a much more contained environment,” said Babaic.

As a government organisation, ANSTO is answerable to the Australian taxpayer, so spending compliance is a critical factor. ANSTO employs a proactive compliance process via Concur Audit, educating users during the expense claim process by sending back messages relating to non-compliant submissions and returning the expense claim for further clarification, or allowing it to proceed through Audit for review and on to the approval process.

“One of the greatest things about Concur that I find as a Concur administrator is educating our users. We educate them through a number of websites, documents that we have written, and online training guides. To see them be able to go through travel request and cash advance, and through to expense and then be reimbursed for whatever expenses they need in a seamless environment is just amazing. It’s a total win-win situation for us,” said Babaic.

“Our users love ExpenseIt. They love being able to just take photos of their receipts on the go and add comments… The OCR works and it matches to each credit card transaction.” Janina Babaic, SAP Concur Administrator, ANSTO

As a dynamic and unique organisation, ANSTO plans to continue to adapt Concur to meet its changing business requirements and include further enhancements and add-ons as they become available. This has been made possible thanks to ANSTO’s use of a Concur Test Site, and also an automated configuration report, that is constantly updated every time a change is made to the production site.

“For ANSTO configurability is really important. By using Concur Extended Services we have been able to configure our site to meet the needs of our users. That also extends into our audit, and compliance and control processes. The beauty of it is, you don’t need to have everything with Concur; you can pick and choose what you can use, you can tailor it, you can remove them, you can add them back in,” said Babaic. “I see our future with Concur as a very bright one.”

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