Business Continuity
Dermalogica drives digital transformation with SAP Concur
Founded by Jane Wurwand in 1986, Dermalogica continues to dominate the professional skin care industry with distribution in over 100 countries. Dermalogica provides professional-grade skin care education, products, and services to skin therapists and customers alike. The company currently employs approximately 180 people in Australia.
Why Dermalogica chose SAP Concur?
- Increased operational efficiencies save the finance team between 30 and 35 hours per week.
- Streamlined reporting with deeper and more timely financial insights across the organisation.
- Increased visibility of spend with a documented audit trail that improves expenditure management.
- An enhanced employee and supplier experience.
- Automated FTP data cleansing for ERP data import
Dermalogica case study
- Increased expense management efficiencies save the finance team between 30 and 35 hours per week.
- Improved the experience for employees and Dermalogica’s suppliers.
- Employee expenses are now reimbursed daily instead of monthly.
- The expense management process gives employees visibility of the progress of their expense approval.
- Managers can easily approve expenses on the go using the mobile app, and delegations are in place for when approvers are away to automatically send expenses to second line approval through the general manager or finance team. This means no expense reimbursement is missed, unlike previous processes.
Achieving digital business transformation
Until 2018, Dermalogica was purely relying on old school, paper-based, manual finance processes. Most processes involved verbal agreements based on trust. While this worked well for the business when it had 20 employees, limitations in financial processes started to emerge when the company was acquired by Unilever and expanded. A lack of financial visibility and no audit trail made it difficult for the finance team to track expenses and payments. This created issues for the company around the potential for errors, duplication, and fraud.
“Our company was previously a private company for 20 or so years and most of the processes were based on a verbal agreement; but, as the company grew and as the clientele expanded, they found it was becoming very messy and dis-allocated. Things had to be run on a more structured level than what it was previously,” said Jenny Chen, senior accountant, Dermalogica.
“Before SAP Concur, the expense process wasn’t structured. Our processes were manual. For example, expense reimbursement simply involved showing a receipt, it got paid and it was manually entered into our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It wasn’t even structured in our bank accounts, we had to manually type in the account number and the notation was nondescript. Once an expense was brought up in auditing, we would have to dig through cabinets full of receipts to locate the specified document.
“We’ve now made a lot of progress regarding how we process expenses. With SAP Concur, there is a process when obtaining approval online, we now mandate a receipt requirement, and there are specific fields you need to complete prior to submission. When approved, it will be processed through the file transfer protocol (FTP) process, it’s automatically imported into my SharePoint, which is amazing because I’m not spending two days at month end trying to input every single entry manually,” said Jenny Chen.
Achieving an audit trail with Concur Expense
After Unilever acquired Dermalogica in 2018, the company realised an automated expense management process from SAP Concur could work well for Dermalogica.
“That’s when we sat down and tried to ascertain where our weaknesses were, what structure we wanted, and what could work well for the company. Bearing in mind, we had people in the business who had been there for 20 to 30 years when there was no process, so we had to slowly introduce the new system,” said Jenny Chen.
Dermalogica chose the SAP Concur automated expense management tool, Concur Expense, to provide the company more visibility of expenditure and to implement an audit trail. Concur Expense captures spend from multiple sources and consolidates spend data in one place, so business leaders can see how spending is happening in near real-time.
“The drill down audit procedure in SAP Concur provides us a lot more leeway. I can easily explain a financial situation to a stakeholder as I can back up advice from the audit trail, and I can catch things in time before financial year end. I can talk to our stakeholders in a manner that they understand, which puts them at ease. That is a big lifesaver for me, because I can see through the audit process where expenses have been approved and I have a trail to show stakeholders. I can also catch any errors or exceptions because the system automatically catches and flags potential duplicate expenses. That’s how we’ve cleaned up our internal processes,” said Jenny Chen.
Improving the employee experience with faster expense reimbursement
Concur Expense helps control spending by keeping expenditure within company policies while simplifying the expense reimbursement process for employees. This is helping to enhance the employee experience within Dermalogica by streamlining administrative processes and giving employees more visibility around their expense reviews and approvals.
“Our employees now enjoy getting reimbursed daily. They were previously only getting reimbursed once per month. They now enjoy the fact that if they put in an expense, within a couple of days it’s paid,” said Jenny Chen.
Previously, the Dermalogica expense approval process for employees was based solely on management approval. When queried on expenses, employees would be unclear where to search for particular transactions.
“Before SAP Concur, there was no structure in expense management and reporting. Now we have processes and employees know there are certain steps that need to be taken for expense reimbursement and payment. With Concur Expense, employees can more easily capture and explain their expenditure as it’s set up in the system, making it much simpler for them to see when expenses are approved, who will be approving the expense, and where money has been spent. It has alleviated a lot of grief regarding the payment process,” said Jenny Chen.
Gaining efficiencies with integrated travel and expense management
Dermalogica is also enhancing the employee experience and improving internal efficiencies by integrating travel with expense management.
“Our employees particularly like travel as they don’t have to go through their own method of getting refunds and credits. We work with a corporate travel company. Our previous travel process was that employees bought their own ticket and were reimbursed, which can be expensive. Now that our system is linked with a travel agency, they can book online and they don’t have to pay because our expense approval process is structured there as well,” said Jenny Chen.
“If an employee’s manager is not available, there is a failsafe for approvals. We have a delegated script that sends the request to the general manager and a second line delegation to the finance team. At the same time, there is email notification so that everyone is a clear for the tasks to be actioned. Everyone has visibility of the process at every stage,” said Jenny Chen.
Controlling spend with Concur Invoice and Concur Purchase Request
SAP Concur solutions are giving Dermalogica much greater levels of cost control, visibility, and transparency, as well as robust processes for expenditure, invoicing, and purchase requests.
“Prior to SAP Concur, our executives didn’t know what invoices came in or out, or how much was spent. By financial year end, it was too late. By that time, we would have overrun in budget. We needed a structure that 7 / 8 involved the right delegation for approvals,” said Jenny Chen.
Purchase Request is an add-on solution to Concur Invoice that gives managers the power to approve or reject expense requests prior to a purchase order being created and before money is spent.
“Concur Invoice and SAP Concur’s Purchase Request tool lets our management team easily review, query, and approve invoices and purchase requests on the go. Previously, most of our approvers only saw the purchase request but not the invoice, so there could be issues with invoices costing more than the approved purchase request. With SAP Concur, senior leaders can review the purchase request and compare this with the invoice to ensure they match,” said Jenny Chen.
Increasing visibility through Concur Budget
Dermalogica also implemented Concur Budget so that department leads could more easily track invoices against purchase requests and map this to their budget for better monitoring and financial reporting.
“It’s easy for leaders to go into Concur Budget when they are approving invoices and purchase requests because it helps them see exactly how their budget is tracking against expenditure,” said Jenny Chen.
“Within the budget tool, it was crucial for our management team to have the ability to pre-check before it hits end of month to support their forecasting. It helps us with business visualisation tools because the dashboards provide business intelligence that is very receptive. When you work with different stakeholders, they don’t want numbers, they want something that is easy to consume,” said Jenny Chen.
Achieving ERP integration through FTP
As well as front-end tools, Dermalogica is achieving benefits from SAP Concur’s backend FTP download platform, which lets the organisation purge data across purchase requests, invoices, expense, travel, and budgets.
"The impact of SAP Concur solutions for Dermalogica has been truly transformational."
“It automatically purges all data sitting in SAP Concur back into my SharePoint so that I can analyse the data. Its power business intelligence is helping our FTP reporting,” said Jenny Chen.
“I love when I request data from the user, I put the necessary fields in my ERP and then, I don’t need to do any more work. Once that is purged, every field matches to the field and connectors in my ERP across invoices, expenses, and travel, for example. Previously, I have had to manually export this information. But now, once it hits the FTP system, data automatically goes through a purge and a clean. When I see it the next day in my SharePoint all I need to do is export it into my ERP and do a final check before I post it,” said Jenny Chen.
A snapshot of business benefits for Dermalogica
Concur Invoice and Purchase Request has reduced the time the finance team needs to process purchase requests and invoices from between 30 to 35 hours a week at month end down to one hour.
SAP Concur solutions have significantly improved the experience for employees and Dermalogica’s suppliers. Employee expenses are now reimbursed daily instead of monthly. The expense management process gives employees visibility of the progress of their expense approval. Managers can easily approve expenses on the go using the mobile app, and delegations are in place for when approvers are away to automatically send expenses to second line approval through the general manager or finance team. This means no expense reimbursement is missed, unlike previous processes.
For suppliers, it now means their invoices get paid on time. Previously, manual processes delayed supplier payments. Suppliers now know there is a process to complete for payment and this is something they have previously been asking for.
The company also has complete visibility with a documented audit trail that lets the finance team monitor expenses and payments in real time and adjust well ahead of the end of financial year. This is helping Dermalogica to better manage expenditure and budgets, while enhancing the employee and supplier experience.
“SAP Concur solutions have been transformational for our business. It has given us efficiencies and an audit flow. This is crucial for our organisation as the minute you touch a process, there is an audit flow,” said Jenny Chen.
“We have slowly introduced these new processes to employees who have been here for 20 to 30 years and we are achieving a lot more transparency.
“We have been able to clean up the risk of errors, duplication, and fraud as everything stops with finance. My job has gone from 30 hours per week of processing to one hour of reviewing, with our financial processes now completely automated,” said Jenny Chen.
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