Concur Fusion: The Connected Journey and SAP-Concur Integration

I attended Concur Fusion in the US last week and in this article I’m sumarising the most most important themes vrom my point of view: “Going Global”, „The Connected Journey“, „The big change the travel industry is facing with direct booking“, „Analytics“, „SAP Integration“, and „Implementation strategies and woes“.

Concur Fusion in numbers

This was the first time I attended Concur Fusion and I have to admit, I’m impressed by the sheer scale:

The number of delegates: 2700
The variety of sessions: usually more than 10 running at any one time during the 4 days
The number of app partners and other partners presenting themselves with their solutions

The whole event was too big for one individual to even begin to follow all content, so this article is my own view not pretending to be comprehensive. It’s what I picked up from the sessions I attended and even more importantly from the conversations I had.

Going Global

There were quite a few sessions and workshops about global rollout and rollout to particular countries – I attended sessions for the UK, Germany, EMEA and global rollout strategies.

Concur has been doing a great job to get more and more local content in, particularly for the European and most notably German market recently. Sure, there’s always more to be done, but with the latest reports and the mobile app being able to process per diems in Q2/2016 some of the biggest gaps for a fast growing market like Germany have been closed and you can see similar improvements happen all over the globe. For global corporates, there shouldn’t be any really big roadblocks left. Public sector organisations will certainly still struggle in some countries, including federal bodies in Germany applying the „Bundesreisekostengesetz“.

Concur as a solution is imo ready for Europe with the UK probably the best country to start your rollout as it is Concur’s most mature market outside North America and also has no language problems. In some markets you may find your Concur implementation consultants lacking local knowledge, so you have to allow extra time or get some local help from partners. A minor issue, if you are aware of it and nothing that should stop you from starting your rollout.

Languages

It is to be noted that not all countries come with a translation (we recently had to learn that there is no Bulgarian version), so customers would have to do that themsleves. Other translations can at times be seen as „creative interpretations“ of the respective language and therefore need some fine tuning, But this is also improving with time and investing in some custom translation work will usually be a price worth paying.

The Forgotten Part of Travel & Expense

Looking at the history of travel & expense software medium and large organisations, it has hitherto primarily focused on the start and the end of the process:

First it was all about expense reports after the trip, basically serving a small team in the accounts department.
Then more and more organisations deployed some form of booking engine or travel request tools to serve the part of the process before the trip. Often driven by procurement.
The bit that seemed forgotten was the actual trip. Little was done to help hundreds or thousands travellers out there serving customers apart from, to some extend, an SOS process to help them in dangerous situations. Surely, those people keeping the engine of your business running deserve more than merely being kept alive?

„The Connected Journey“ with Concur at its Centre

This is where the vision of the connected journey comes in. At Concur Fusion, it was a theme in a large number of sessions and it became even more apparent in the exhibition hall. An ecosystem connecting with Concur Travel and/or Expense along every step of the process – or should I say: connecting with the traveller and the supporting teams via Concur.

E-receipts and Tripit Pro

Being able to use ever more vendors and channels to book travel and receiving automated e-receipts through connected accounts is only the start, though already a huge help for travellers. The Tripit Pro App sits at the heart of any longer journey and makes it much easier for a traveller to manage their itinerary on a mobile device. It also

alerts you in case of delays or cancelations
helps you to find ground transport or navigate to your hotel
makes it easy to manage your frequent traveller accounts
tracks availability of preferred seats
allows your travel manager or line manager to monitor the itineraries of the whole team or
and can show you, where your colleagues or friends are, if they give permission

Integrations with the Concur ecosystem going further

But the connected journey is going to go way beyond that and some integration already available today (not all in all regions) comprise:

connecting to your VISA provider to make sure every traveller gets permission to travel
alerting you to risks and necessary precautions like vaccinations
notifying your device management colleagues to make sure the necessary roaming agreements are in place and you don’t get a nasty surprise like a 5 figure data roaming bill
automatically creating entertainment expenses including all attendees just by including Concur in the invitation (see this earlier blog post in our Concur blog)
tracing mileage directly via GPS using a mobile app or even an app integrated into the car
integrating with your meeting/events management solution to align travel booking and easily keep track of expenses related to the event
connecting to Concur Messaging to track your employees, give them valuable tips to find their way around and help them in case of serious risks like natural disasters or terror attacks.
using a compliance tool to spot suspicious expenses or trends for your compliance team to look into
allowing your foreign VAT recovery service access to all receipts through Concur, so they can handle the VAT recovery for you.
Using a 3rd party software connecting exclusively to Concur to invoice expenses based on Concur data and receipts images (a persona favourite of mine> as a consultancy, invoicing expenses for customers, who don’t have a flat rate, is a very time consuming task and prone to errors that lose you money).

Triplink

Hitherto there was always the problem of travel booked outside Concur (e.g. because a conference hotel rate you can only get on the conference website). Many of the beautiful integrations mentioned require the bookings to be in Concur. This is now changing with Triplink. Whilst you can forward any booking confirmation to plans@concur.com to have them integrated into your itinerary (and even a travel manager can do it for you), more and more vendors become Triplink partners, so you don”t even have to do that any more (more about Triplink next section below)

So, whilst usually sceptical about buzz-lines, I have to admit: this marketing buzz-line of “The Connected Journey” is coming true. It allows you to drive process efficiencies, save money and most notably makes travelling easier for your employees leaving more time and energy to serve your customers and contributing its bit to a better work-life-balance.

See this Concur blog post to learn how “The Connected Journey” worked for myself on my trip to Las Vegas for Concur Fusion.

The Travel Industry is Facing a Big Change: Direct Booking and Concur Triplink

Traditionally, most corporate travel has been booked through a travel agency or travel management company (TMC), as they like to be called now, and then again most of those bookings (at least for flights and hotels) went through a GDS (Global Distribution System). Both intermediaries claim some fee, whether visible or hidden in the price of the ticket. Booking directly creates all kinds of issues, because these bookings are not supervised by your policy rules in Concur, not included in your analytics and, because you basically don’t really know, where your employees are, duty-of-care related processes also fall short.

The Travelfusion feature in Concur Travel at least allows you to book flights not included in the GDS (such as many low cost carriers). Concur’s integration with train companies or aggregators like Trainline, hotel booking services like HRS or booking.com and various ground transport providers also give you non-GDS content inside Concur.

However, there is still a lot of booking happening outside Concur and often for a good reason. Be it a hotel offer you can only book through the related conference page or some direct link to a promotion: employees booking outside the tool are often doing so to keep cost down, not to cheat. With airlines like Lufthansa now making GDS fees visible as a separate item and therefore avoidable by direct booking, there will be even more occasions, where direct booking can make sense from a cost point of view.

Concur Triplink

This is where Triplink comes in: This relatively new feature allows users to easily connect their direct booking accounts with Concur (e.g. through their loyalty card number), so they have access to negotiated rates and bookings go directly into Concur travel to be checked against policy, flow into reporting and trigger all the integrated processes like duty-of-care. So far, the number of Triplink partners is still quite low, but growing every month. For those vendors not yet signed up for Triplink, forwarding booking confirmations to plans@concur.com will still integrate them in your itinerary and makes your trip visible to your corporate travel team.

Those, who’ve read my blogs on HCM systems, know that I’m not a friend of middlemen, who impose themselves onto a transaction without adding real value. So, imo Triplink is a great start to take the GDS out of the equation, as the current state of technology has the potential to make them obsolete. Direct booking is being driven forward in the industry and it will be interesting to see, where the journey will take us.

For now, Triplink is highly recommended to get visibility of all your travel and save some fees occasionally. You’ll also be on the right track to exploit more savings through direct booking further down the line.

Analytics

There were quite a few sessions on the Analysis tool (included in the normal subscription fee) as well as well as Concur Intelligence (separate subscription fee). The most important lesson form the sessions as well as conversations: most Concur customers don’t use it as much as they could – and wanted to. One important reason for this is that this topic is touched only briefly during implementation projects and users are pretty much left to their own devices, unless they get some extra help on board. Unfortunately a common theme.

A very recent and imo great development are “persona based” dashboards (in plain English, you’d call them “role-based”), which are included in the Intelligence package for all subscription models. My favourite is the line manager (or “Department Manager”) dashboard providing them with the key metrics to drill down into and also giving them an option to set and monitor budgets and to set up alerts. This is a great way to get buy-in from line managers. This important group of change agents for Concur adoption would often feel like they are only asked to feed into the tool, but never get anything back. This dashboard would definitely make it easier for them to do their own job:

I’d strongly encourage all Concur customers to look into dashboards. They shouldn’t be to difficult to set up and if you don”t have the time, get a little bit of help: it will pay off.

Concur – SAP ERP Integration

SAP-Concur integration is something many customers and even more would-be customers in Europe have been waiting for. The old Dell Boomi based Financial Connector between Concur and SAP has never convinced anybody I talked to, but help is nigh!

The new integration package to be available early in Q2/2016 comprises:

Employee Master Data Synchronisation

Direct integration (no file transfer) as job
Concur fields can be mapped flexibly against SAP Infotype fields
No integration with SuccessFactors Employee Central yet. This is on the roadmap, but not yet clear when. To bridge the gap we recommend to work with file exports and imports. Let me know, if you need help – we have Employee Central experts on our team

Finance Master Data Synchronisation

Direct integration (no file transfer) as job. It is recommended to run it every 5 minutes or even more often to avoid usage of non-existent cost objects
Transfers cost centres, WBS elements, internal orders, network activities, sales orders for Concur Expense
Transfers Purchase orders and vendors for Concur Invoice
Best practise: keep all cost objects in Concur in one connected list with a 4-level hierarchy, but other set-ups can be supported

Financial Posting

It works for traditional SAP ERP. S4 HANA support is planned for later this year. Get in touch with SAP, if you need it.
Reports to be posted are selected by date, system, company code and cost objects
Double posting it blocked
If an error occurs, the respective expense report is stopped completely from being posted and receives a status to reflect that there was a posting error. It can then be changed in Concur and reposted.
Currently, expense repost can’t be changed after posting. This is going to change probably later this year and then the posting interface will be able to recognise changes and post the differences – similar to what you may know from the SAP on-premise Travelmanagement solution
Successful posting as well as payment info are sent back to Concur
Full audit trail is visible in Concur
Integration with Concur Pay is not yet supported

General setup of the Concur-SAP integration

Th setup is much easier than it used to be between SAP Cloud for Travel and SAP ERP
The add-ons required can be downloaded from Service Marketplace and installed on your SAP Development system(s) to be transported to other system. Further setup is really quick and wizard guided and needs to happen on each SAP system involved.
All communication goes through one single RFC connection. Communication is always opened up by the ERP system, so the ERP is never ”talking to strangers”. Concur only ever replies to requests from SAP ERP. To establish a secure communication, certificates need to be applied according to SAP guidance.
Concur doesn’t know the concept of time dependency, so master data is only transferred, when it’s valid (i.e. open for posting).
There are BAdIs available for further customisation
The solution is supported for SAP ERP ECC 6.0 upwards

There is no payroll integration available yet, but it”s on the roadmap. If you need payroll integration now or if the new standard design doesn’t work for you for some reason, iProCon does offer a pragmatic and quick to implement SAE-file-based integration for posting, payment and payroll integration (taxable pay, payment though payroll and other legal requirements like M-flag for Germany or P11D for the UK)

So, what?

This little article certainly could only scratch the surface of an event with hundreds of sessions – particularly as I didn’t manage to clone myself to be able to attend parallel sessions (that’s one tool missing from the Concur App Centre). But I hope it could give you an idea for the journey ahead.

There is much more value in Concur than most customers are making use of

Concur is so much more than just a tool for capturing expenses and booking flights. It is an excellent solution with a very complete vision for the end-2-end travel process and even though you can still see the Stars and Stripes all over it, it’s now really ready for other regions – definitely for Europe. I know very few organisations, who couldn’t benefit a lot from implementing Concur. The question that pops up again and again talking to customers, including those, who are extremely happy with the solution is: why are they using such a small part of Concur and its eco-system, when there is so much more value to be gained?

The biggest problem by miles is not related to the solution itself at all, but to a lack of understanding, leading to many customers not getting even close to the full benefit of Concur Travel and Expense. What we hear from various customers and prospects in Europe and what has been confirmed to me by talking to many delegates at Concur Fusion is that the implementation service just covers the very basics. Many customers are lost between filling in workbooks and rushed demos and their comments comprise

“We felt very rushed”
“I had no idea what impact me filling in certain workbook fields would have”
“The consultant was difficult to understand as we are no native speakers and their English had a strong accent. Sometimes we just gave up”
“I didn’t dare to ask, as they always said ‘this is easy’ or ‘you have seen this a few times already’. It later turned out everybody on the call had the same issues”
I had an interesting experience myself, when in Q2/2015 I asked our travel implementation consultant about Triplink, a strategic initiative at Concur, and he didn’t know, what it was.

Understanding, what the implementation service does – and what it doesn’t do

So, yes, the implementation is focused on technical deployment and everything else is left to the customer. This is all ok, as long as customers are aware of it and know, where to get help, if needed.

The problems often start with the misunderstanding that the technical implementation service is actually a full scale consultancy service as customers might expect from a SAP service partner. Customers with these expectations need to work with a combination of the Concur implementation service and a consultancy partner to complement that service on the strategy, design, process and change management tasks. And possibly support the customer through resource bottlenecks in testing or enablement. Not all partners/advisors will be able to do that, as some are merely focused on lead generation to earn commission, not on service.

Get that added value and Concur will pay off quickly

But that shouldn’t stop anybody from implementing Concur – or taking a closer look, if they haven’t done so already. This year’s Concur Fusion conference was proof to me that it’s an excellent solution already with a huge scope to choose from to cut cost and improve your process – and the vision for the future is definitely a great one. So prepare yourself with the right team or some 3rd party help and there’s much to be gained.

If you have any further questions about my Concur Fusion experience, of the Concur solution in general, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.