The ‘fraud’ pea, the ‘travel’ mattress and the ‘IT’ princess

MUMBAI, INDIA: There is suddenly a new moral in that legendary ‘Princess and the Pea’ tale. Somehow you pause to wonder whether the princess would have been able to feel the wicked pea, had it not been for years of luxury and indulgence that she had been used to. A girl from the bourgeoisie would have snored happily in the same circumstances, oblivious to umpteen peas and even rocks since that’s what an average person learns to live with and slumber on.

Just the way enterprises have got used to doze on some gross misappropriations and losses (inadvertent and otherwise) while rolling down a make-shift travel management blanket?

Or so it appears when Nick Evered, Sr VP & GM Concur Technologies APAC, comes to India and passionately picks out the many stones that stay hidden right under the nose of most organizations as they fail to realize the advantages of blue-blooded automation.

We lay down these stones for a quick walk here and also ask him if it is possible to accommodate conflicting pillows of bureaucracy, control, ancillary spends, carbon footprint and consumerisation on the IT duvets he swears by.

Let’s check out his idea of a sound sleep.

First, when you stand and spot the state of travel and expense management, how much do you see this being split between manual and automated or in-house, on-premise and cloud?

Travel and Expense management, if you ask me, has always been a manual process but most companies have started to see it as a time-consuming one. Some have started using semi-automated systems, some are still using manual as a dominant factor and yet we need to realize that it is a labor-intensive process wherein time-delays make the situation more expensive. A lot of changes are driving a new scenario. High-tech manufacturing, pharma or oil and gas are verticals are high on this ladder and managing travel and expense better. While the movement from manual to automated is happening pretty fast, cloud is also offering better visibility, better reporting, better compliance and more sophistication here. Homegrown answers are also good but interface between internal and external parts has to be taken care of, more so, as today’s average citizen is very tech-savvy.

Is it not tricky to balance both the management side and user needs - between extremes like Control-plus-visibility and discomfort with bureaucracy?

That’s the foundation of how Concur has gone about this space. We inject as much transparency, access and at the same time as much usability as possible. Isn’t it wonderful to have something that balances the two extremes? We can bend some rules of companies’ view of access and try to manage them with better, relevant corporate policies. That’s a bit of challenge but also the need of the hour.

What about the recent spate of other issues like rise in travel scams, cost of travel and incidental spends? Do they fall in some shadow area and hence more difficult to manage?

As a company, we specialize in data security and offer the most sophisticated technologies, thus able to satisfy numerous levels of security checks and audits with increased levels of mobility of travelers also. Instant visibility helps a corporate look into any kind of scam and confront it with right controls on transactions. Technology allows for many levels of checks and balances in the overall system, at various touch-points, which is not possible in manual scenarios. That’s why there is more room for frauds and scams in manual systems.

What about cases that go as high as CEO-level loopholes, like we ironically saw in a Polycom controversy regarding irregularities at the level of the top helm itself?

Without commenting specifically, I would say that most frauds operate at multiple levels. But when approvals go through many departments and people with the kind of 360 degree visibility that technology equips the organization with, chances of mistakes or leaks are reduced significantly. A hundred-percent fraud-proof situation is of course impossible, but a lot of layer can be covered with stronger transparency and hence enough deterrents.

Is there a green angle to automated travel management also?

Yes, because of the consequential paperless organization, and also since when you know how much and whose travel is happening, the enterprise can reduce unnecessary travel. In fact, according to a latest Concur Survey, more than a fourth each of the executives surveyed said they are dissatisfied or not satisfied at all with the system’s ability to request and approve travel and expenses anytime anywhere (31 per cent), track who is spending how much, how frequently and where (27 per cent), and act on spend before it takes place (27 per cent).

How customization-friendly are such solutions?

They are very much configurable as per specific needs and we also advise on best practices.

How exciting are these times for Concur, and how far does the company intend to travel in this geography?

We have expanded a large support centre in Manila and also expanding in India, and across North Asia. We are reshaping how business travelers operate and we would like to be the right catalysts here. In India, the business travel market is exploding and our transaction volumes are on the rise. We see a huge market opportunity here. Incidentally, our survey hinted that in India, the key frustration from the existing T&E experience is a lack of visibility, cited by 41 per cent of respondents., followed by loss of time and productivity due to the time consumed (39 per cent), the lack of control over spends(30 per cent) and issues faced during audit (also 30 per cent). So there is a lot to cover here.