Business Travel Management: Digital Processes Replace Paper-Based Workflows

For many employees of the Thuringia State Development Corporation (LEG Thüringen), business travel is part of their daily routine, whether as part of an economic delegation or on official trips within Thuringia. However, business travel management at LEG—a wholly owned subsidiary of the Free State of Thuringia that carries out key tasks in economic and structural development—had previously been paper-based. To submit travel expense reports, employees filled out a form, collected receipts, and sent everything via internal mail to the accounting department, which manually entered the data into SAP FI. This process lacked transparency, was prone to errors, and was time-consuming; processing a single report often took several days.

From Paper to Digital Workflow

Since the introduction of SAP Concur Request and Expense, business travel management has been standardized. „This simplifies and speeds up processes enormously, while also making them transparent and virtually error-free. It also eliminates the need to print receipts, which reduces costs and promotes sustainability,“ says Martin Bräutigam, the project manager in charge at LEG Thüringen.

The results speak for themselves: Overall, the digital processes reduce the processing time per transaction by an average of at least 50 to 60 percent. Whereas a travel expense report used to take one to two hours, it now takes only 15 to 30 minutes; and in some cases, approval and transfer to SAP are completed in a single day. Since integrated reporting functions allow for monthly analyses of travel and expenses by department, these can be tracked at any time.

In practice, the approximately 330 end-user travel requests are submitted directly through SAP Concur. The request is sent to the appropriate supervisor, who approves or rejects it if it violates the guidelines of the Thuringian Travel Expenses Act (ThürRKG). Thanks to the deputy function in Concur, travel requests can be approved even when the supervisor is absent.

Travel expense receipts are captured as photo scans in the app and linked to the respective amounts paid via the company credit card, which are automatically imported into SAP Concur Expense. This minimizes processing backlogs and significantly reduces the workload on employees.

„LEG decided to go with Concur after a
Market analysis. ”The deciding factor was the range of features.”

Martin Bräutigam,
Project Manager,
LEG Thuringia

LEG decided to go with SAP Concur following a market analysis. The deciding factors were the scope of functionality, the integration with the SAP landscape, and the inclusion of legal requirements in the standard solution. Orbis was awarded the contract for the implementation.

The implementation proceeded quickly and came in under the agreed-upon budget, despite various challenges. These included mapping the ThürRKG requirements for travel expense reimbursement and integrating Commerzbank’s expense credit cards via a standard interface so that transaction data would be automatically imported into SAP Concur. Another challenging task was setting up the reverse-charge procedure, which correctly shifts the sales tax liability to LEG and required the precise configuration of tax groups, expense types, and validation rules.

SAP Concur was also connected bidirectionally to SAP FI via the standard ICS interface: This allows journal entries and invoices from Concur to flow directly into Financial Accounting; conversely, cost centers, PSP elements, and internal orders from SAP FI, as well as HR data from SAP SuccessFactors, are transferred to the travel management solution.

End-to-End Travel Processes

Mapping travel processes in SAP Concur is also another building block in LEG Thüringen’s digitalization strategy, which is being consistently advanced. The company recently migrated from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA, and modern solutions—including SAP SuccessFactors for HR and the ECM solution enaio from Optimal Systems—have been in use for quite some time.

Martin Bräutigam offers a positive assessment: „The implementation of SAP Concur Request and Expense is an important step toward digitizing, standardizing, and optimizing internal processes.“ The company is evaluating the implementation of SAP Concur Travel to map the entire process—from request to booking to reimbursement—end-to-end in a single solution. (pmf)