I’ve been asked to contribute a piece about Concur to Jarret Pazahanick’s „The Future of SAP HCM and SuccessFactors Consulting – 2015„, and then ended up with far too many ideas for poor Jarret to accommodate in his blog. So, I created this extra article for those, who want a few more thoughts about Concur in particular (just remember: this is my personal view, with no claim to have inside knowledge of SAP’s plans or a magic crystal ball):
Also check out this article: Concur Travel and Expense: Getting the Most from Your Concur Implementation
Concur is the latest big addition to the SAP universe and one I was very happy to learn about, because I’ve worked with the solution before and loved it.
What would I expect to happen in 2015?
Travel and Expense data is certainly something most customers would be more relaxed about regarding perceived cloud security issues than many other sets of data. Also, by the nature of the process, T&E is shouting for easy to deploy and easy to use mobile apps as well as 3rd party integration (vendors, audit services, VAT reclaim, travel alerts, you name it…). These are strong arguments for a cloud T&E solution. So, why haven’t customers queued up for SAP’s home grown T&E cloud – it should be selling like hot cakes? Well, it seems to try too hard to replicate the old solution and falls short of really leveraging the advantages of cloud based design. The big advantage of the old solution is it’s adaptability by means of BAdIs, function exits, modifications and custom programmed workflows. Loose that by moving it into the cloud and you’ve got the worst from both worlds. And to be fair: as cloud T&E solutions go, Concur has been leading the market by such a huge margin that it“s almost inconceivable anybody could catch up soon. So, my most confident prediction is: the old SAP cloud solution for T&E is dead. If you want cloud T&E from SAP, this is the future (click onto thw picture for a larger view):
Still, I don’t think there’ll be a big rush of on-premise Travel Management users to switch to Concur this year. Customers reasonably happy with a stable system including Self Services will not see the urgency and therefore watch the solution, integration and licensing model develop while waiting for a real business need to change.
Having said that, I’ve spoken already to customers, who are less than happy with their on-premise solution (as always: this is not necessarily the fault of the product, but often down to how it’s been implemented) and are exploring options to switch.
Towards the second half of 2015 I’d expect a trickle of on-premise customers starting the move, because they are at a point where considerable investment is required anyway and they’d rather make this in the cloud than in their old solution. Triggers may be:
- Extending the process to travel planning and booking
- a strong need for easy and reliable vendor integration
- introducing self services
- introducing mobile access (above and beyond a simple approval step)
How fast these customers will be making a move depends a lot on SAP clarifying with some credibility what the roadmaps for enhanced integration and the licensing model are. The experience with SuccessFactors has shown that customers hate paying twice for the same process from the same vendor (surprise!) and that over-promising and under-delivering on integration in the early stages post acquisition is a sure way to give a great solution a bad name. SAP seems to have come round to these ideas last year, so I’m confident it will be handled much better with Concur.
My recommendation: if you consider any significant changes to your Travel Management now, look at Concur as well now!
This leaves customers, who don’t have a T&E solution in SAP yet. Some of them may have evaluated the on-premise solution and found it’s not for them. Others may have it in their wish list already, but haven’t got to do it yet. Both groups should and will look at Concur now and I expect many of them to go for it. Again: the schedule will depend on SAP’s integration roadmap. Sure, even some new T&E customers will still chose on-premise, unless SAP is strongly discouraging it. Reasons for this could be:
- a firm „no cloud“ strategy
- complex statutory rules not covered by Concur out of the box (possibly some public sector rules outside North America)
- a preference to have highly customised rules for workflows and posting carved in stone via custom programming (translating into BAdIs etc. in SAP on-premise)
- a focus on the expense side only
Ok, so I expect a good number of takers for Concur, albeit no flood gates opening yet. What do those new Concur disciples get for their troubles?
To begin with: certainly an excellent user experience with strong mobile capabilities and an efficient process. Having implemented the tool myself for our small UK team in December, I can confirm this as a user as well. One colleague, whom I had to chase for his expenses every single month so far, was now ready to go on the evening of his last trip of the month, commenting „Wow. Expenses are fun now!“ (Well, Marc, happy to serve :-) ).
So, user experience, travel planning and vendor integration are on the plus side for sure. Integration into an existing SAP landscape is still in its early days. There is a standard solution for FI/CO integration based on DELL Boomi and IDOCs. There are tools available for limited integration in HR master data and payroll. But it’s not what you may be used to in your existing SAP package.
My recommendation for customers: look at the existing options. You will probably find a pragmatic solution that’s good enough and helps you to reap the benefits of the Concur offering. Then watch the SAP roadmap for improvements – some may even become available by the time you go live with Concur. I’m mildly optimistic about SAP delivering on FI/CO, HR master and payroll integration in 2015 – probably on a choice of platforms, even though SAP HANA cloud will be the long term objective.
What I don’t expect to happen yet in 2015:
- in the long run SAP will aim at a unified user experience. That will take some time. But as T&E is a pretty independent process, it’s not a big issue for now
- Concur is flexible enough for customers to use it for contingency staff and – using central agents – scenarios like candidate expenses or international transfers. In the long run, integrating the solution with Fieldglass and SuccessFactors recruiting is desirable, indeed. Don’t expect anything like that in 2015: this is the year to get the basics right.
Some further thoughts:
- the acquisition of Concur gets SAP onto a completely different scale when it comes to the small and medium business market. Whilst the solution is being used by large global corporates, there are also thousands of small businesses and micro businesses using it as well. It will be interesting to see whether and how SAP
a) accommodates those customers in their future licensing, support and partnership models
b) goes beyond that and manages to leverage this new capability to eventually master that market with other solutions as well – something they’ve been trying since ca. 2001 with limited success
- Together with Ariba, Concur looks like SAP’s ticket into the network economy, where integration with travel vendors and value added services opens up completely new options for customers.
- It remains to be seen, what the fate of „Concur invoice“ is going to be. I’d expect it to be merged with other solutions in the long run.
- With „Tripit“ Concur even has an app catering for the consumer as well as the corporate market. Is this a starting point for SAP to offer further apps to deliver as part of the enterprise package as well as opening them up to consumers to use independently? Say, barcode scanners, translation tools, currency converters or tax calculators to name just a few ideas.
SAP will have to act on these opportunities in 2015 – even though the impact will only really be felt later on. Some points are long shots, but if SAP really becomes a strong player in the small business market or even the B2C market, then this would amount to changes in the business model at least as significant as the technology change coming with S4HANA.
Thanks for the posting – we are looking at implementing Concur on a ECC6 FICO system which includes HCM.
Would you be able to provide a guideline for the internal resource/time we should anticipate for implementation purposes e.g. ABAP 5 days; FICO 10 days, etc.? based on your internal implementation would be fine.
As you say, integration with SAP seems to be in early days and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of information around on this aspect.
Hi Seosamh,
this depends completemy on your context and requirements. There is a standard integration with FICO available already, if you are happy to use DELL Boomi and Idocs, but you may have more complex needs and require integration with HR master data, Orgstructure data, payroll, SAP CATS,…
And then: implementation doesn’t only require integration, but you need to define, configure and train your Concur based processes, as well.
The effort also tends to be lower for small organisations, as you can be more pragmatic with 50 employees than with 50,000 and each country adds complexity as well.
Our own implementation is probably not very relevant for you, as our UK team are only 5 people – so, a completely different kettle of fish from a corporate deployment. But for reference: it took one week and 6 hours from my time plus 1 from our accountant :-)
I can give you one different example:
I project managed a Concur (travel booking as well as expenses) rollout for 2000 people in 10 countries in 3 months. The project also included SAP integration with the credit card provider, rollout of new credit cards and a new global TMC.
Apart from teh Concur people, the customer had:
– a 75% project manager
– a 100% change / workforce communication manager
– 2 people from the finance / expense team with ca. 25% each
– 20 days of SAP recources for config changes and interfaces
– 30 users accross all locations contributimng a few hours per week during user acceptance test
– a 100% project office support resource, who also did some of the customer side COncur configuration
– help desk as a service from Concur from go-life day
– custom e-trainings designed by and procured from Concur
– various other resources from Finance, HR, Legal, IT, local facilitie steams etc. for a few hours or days here and there
This sounds like a lot, but be aware that the smallest part of these resources were directly related to the technical Concur implementation. It was mostly about defining and communicating processes, helping users, getting the physical credit cards to people, discussing contracts with Concur, the TMC, the credit card firm,…
But: if you switch to Concur, you are likely to have a lot of those same changes as well, as you won’t be able to get the full benefit out of it.