Case study: Lion takes transparency and accountability seriously to help accelerate growth and productivity

Lion is a leading beverages company in Australasia, with fast-growing operations in the United States and United Kingdom. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Kirin Holdings, Lion Group produces, markets, sells and distributes alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and operates microbreweries worldwide. Lion is New Zealand’s largest and most iconic alcohol beverage company, and one of Australia’s largest brewers. Lion employs more than 1500 people in Australia and 1200 people in New Zealand.

Why Lion choose SAP Concur?

Replacing largely manual and cumbersome travel and expense management processes to provide greater control, visibility and efficiency for Lion, providing significant improvements in the employee experience, cost savings through better reporting, and driving better spending behaviour and policy compliance across the organisation.

Lion case study

The greater visibility, reporting capability and systems integration afforded by Concur Expense and Concur Travel have significantly enhanced Lion’s ability to tackle compliance to its ‘Spending At Lion Policy’.

"With the implementation of Concur Expense and its integration with Lion’s SAP ERP system, greater visibility into T&E, more accurate and granular reporting has helped Lion’s Group Tax team improve data quality around compliance and resulted in significant time savings." - Emillia Jones, Buyer Operations Leader, Lion Australia and New Zealand.

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Lion’s ANZ integration of Concur Travel and Expense successfully driving compliance with ‘Spending At Lion Policy’

Lion has undertaken a successful three-year phased project with its goals to enhance the employee experience, tackle policy compliance and improve control on travel.

Prior to the implementation of Concur Expense in 2018, Lion was reliant on largely manual expense management processes and, prior to the implementation of Concur Travel in 2020, its external travel management company (TMC) provider looked after all corporate travel bookings. The overall T&E process was timeconsuming and frustrating for employees, and Lion had little or no visibility and control on travel and expense, which made it difficult to encourage compliant behaviours and to report accurately on spending. Introducing Concur Detect in July 2021 has allowed Lion to move from auditing a small set of random expenses to 100% audit coverage, strengthening internal controls and improved overall compliance.

Improving the Employee Experience

“Our first priority was to improve the user experience for our employees, so they would spend less time processing expenses, and more time on value-adding activities,” said Emillia Jones, Buyer Operations Leader, Lion Australia and New Zealand.

Lion was using a very manual expense system where employees had to populate a blank form with all of the expense details, such as city of supply and expense type. Receipts could not be attached at the expense item level, which made approving and audit of expenses difficult and time consuming. There was no integration with Lion’s SAP ERP system, so fields couldn’t be pre-populated and data couldn’t be shared between systems.

Concur Expense has changed all of that for Lion. There is integration with SAP, so that fields can be pre-populated or relevant codes can be selected from drop-down lists, while the ExpenseIt mobile app allows users to complete their expense reports from anywhere, taking photos of their receipts to attach and submit assigned to specific expense lines. Concur’s partnerships large hotel chains and travel providers like Uber, where e-receipts are automatically sent into Concur and matched to the expense has added to the efficiency and convenience of the system. Concur is also integrated with Lion’s SAP HR system so that employee profiles are automatically updated in Concur, and new profiles created or deleted whenever someone joins or leaves Lion. This ensures that data integrity is maintained and any potential process bottlenecks are avoided by having a daily update of fields associated with the employee’s role and reporting lines.

Feedback from Lion’s employees about Concur Expense has been overwhelmingly positive, with the time taken to process expenses reduced by at least 50%.

Improving Spend Visibility and Reporting

“As one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest brewers, and an operator of numerous venues, Lion’s entertainment expenses are significantly larger than a typical corporate enterprise. In our old system, there wasn’t any scope to capture the different types of attendees or events, so we were missing out on potential savings and expenditure insight,” said Jones.

With the implementation of Concur Expense and its integration with Lion’s SAP ERP system, greater visibility into T&E, more accurate and granular reporting has helped Lion’s Group Tax team improve data quality around compliance and resulted in significant time savings.

The integration with our SAP system and with our corporate card provider means that the majority of expense data is already pre-populated for our employees. Concur will even select and recommend an expense type which both improves compliance rates and is also a real time saver for employees.” Emillia Jones, Buyer Operations Leader, Lion Australia and New Zealand.

Concur’s reporting capabilities have been applied more broadly across the business to assist Lion’s leadership team in better managing spend and policy compliance. Working with Concur’s Consultative Intelligence service, Lion developed at least 10 new custom reports, which are integrated into Microsoft Power BI dashboards to provide monthly spending insights as well as giving leaders the ability to view Concur expenses for their team, and drill down into reports to check for compliance against policy.

Greater Control over Travel and Employee Safety

Lion launched Concur Travel in the middle of the Australian and New Zealand COVID-19 lockdown in August 2020, but even with restricted travel, more than 85% of bookings are being made directly through Concur by employees, which has generated both time and cost savings.

“The roll out of Concur Travel across the organisation has enabled us to generate savings by providing employees with their own direct booking tool, and embedding our policy rules within Concur. This ensures our employees adhere to travel policy guidelines such as booking with preferred airlines and hotels, while keeping our people safe by restricting travel during times of lockdown and border closures due to COVID-19. With constantly changing border closures and travel restrictions, it was a huge benefit to use Concur to control bookings and manage different fare types centrally to ensure overall travel compliance,” said Jones.

Ensuring Greater Compliance

The greater visibility, reporting capability and systems integration afforded by Concur Expense and Concur Travel have significantly enhanced Lion’s ability to tackle compliance to its ‘Spending At Lion Policy’.

Prior to the implementation of Concur Detect, Lion had only been auditing a small random sample of expense reports for compliance. Detect, which uses AI and machine learning to automatically analyse expense reports, has allowed Lion to audit 100% of reports, capturing non-compliant expenses in real-time and return these expenses to employees for correction and re-submission.

In the first four weeks since switching on Concur Detect on 1 July 2021, Lion has identified and audited over 600 high risk expenses, increased visibility into non-compliant spend, and changed spending behaviours within the organisation.

“When I first joined Lion about 10 years ago, I was originally in our risk assurance team. One of my first jobs was investigating corporate card spend within Lion. With the systems we had in place at the time, to get some data to look into a particular individual was a full week process, because we needed to send the request off to someone, so that they could go into the system and run all the extracts. Then we had to check compliance manually to see how it sat with our policies. Now with Concur, you can see very easily all the extracts of the expense report with the receipts attached. And the beauty of Detect with how it is operating, all that thinking is taken care of and you just get a nice little output that says ‘here are the high risk ones, let’s have a look into it’. Also, being able to catch these issues earlier and have the right conversations with those people much earlier in the cycle is a better outcome for Lion and the team member,” said Andrew Cork, Finance Services Director, Lion Australia and New Zealand.

Lion’s Future T&E Plans

With Concur Expense, Travel and Detect, and the support of Concur’s Service Administration and Consultative Intelligence teams, Lion has the right platform, tools and resources in place. Now, the company is focused on building out the platform and other integrations to continue to optimise the expense process and deliver further value for the business.

Lion is also looking for opportunities to utilise greater functionality with Concur Travel, including driving better compliance in the booking process, building more logic into the system, doing a full integration with Uber for Business, and potentially rolling out TripIt Pro, Concur’s mobile app that acts as a personal travel assistant and automatically delivers all relevant content in real-time for travellers.

Concur’s custom reporting and spend visibility generated through monthly leader reports and Power BI dashboards has given us so much more governance and control on spending across the organisation.” Andrew Cork, Finance Services Director, Lion Australia and New Zealand

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