Travel and Expense
HR, IT & Finance urged to align on corporate travel
Business travel no longer sits neatly within an administrative function. It spans employee experience, policy, approvals, data management and risk oversight, making the relationship between HR and IT central to how travel programmes perform in practice.
Fabian Calle, Managing Director, Small and Medium Business, SAP Concur Australia and New Zealand, said travel programmes often fail when departments set priorities independently and leave employees to navigate the gaps.
"Alignment between people and technology leaders is a commercial necessity, not a cultural aspiration. Travel touches almost every part of the organisation, and when HR, IT and finance make decisions in isolation, the program cannot deliver the experience employees expect," Calle said.
Travel programmes typically combine HR-led rules on wellbeing and flexibility, IT-led controls on security and standardisation, and finance-led requirements for budget discipline and auditability. In many organisations, those elements develop through separate governance processes, leading to duplicated tools, inconsistent workflows, and unclear ownership of exceptions and support.
He also talked about:
- Employee impact: "The employee experience is where the consequences of misalignment are often first felt. Fragmented systems, slow approvals and manual workarounds leave employees navigating policies that make sense in theory yet fall apart in practice. Over time, this frustration turns into disengagement, reluctance to travel, and even avoidance. No one wants to spend hours fighting procedures that don't align across departments just to submit travel expenses or requests, and no leader should want their team forfeiting that time either," Calle said.
- Cross-functional asset: SAP Concur said organisations should reframe travel as a cross-functional business asset rather than a back-office process. Under that model, ownership sits with multiple leaders and policies reflect broader outcomes, including staff experience, tax and expenses, access to reliable data, compliance reporting and sustainability metrics.
- Shared measures: Calle said organisations should set shared guidelines for corporate travel that reflect each function's requirements, and track outcomes in ways that avoid forcing trade-offs between traveller experience and cost.
- System integration: SAP Concur said the third step is platform and process integration. Integrated tools can reduce the need for travellers to re-enter information across systems and strengthen the link between policy and approvals. They can also help organisations maintain consistent documentation across HR, IT and finance requirements.
"The long-term value of collaboration extends beyond today's business travel experience. Integrated data supports better policy design, stronger compliance oversight and more informed investment decisions. Corporate travel programs sit at the heart of how organisations support their people. However, the benefit depends on collaboration, alignment and integration across departments, and ultimately on the employee experience of the program,"
- Fabian Calle, Managing Director, Small and Medium Business, SAP Concur Australia and New Zealand
