Streamline Travel & Expense Management with Hyperautomation

Hyperautomation: It's a Mouthful, but It's Transforming How Travel and Expenses Get Managed

It's 9:30 a.m. and your day is already dragging because you're buried by an avalanche of old receipts and manual expense reports. 

If you work in travel and expense management, this scenario might sound disturbingly familiar. Collecting paper receipts and trying to find out what happened to missing travel documents is a painful part of the job for many workers.

Yet it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, it doesn't have to be painful at all, thanks to a technology concept called hyperautomation.

Let's take a closer look at what hyperautomation is, how it helps, and how SAP Concur leverages it to help organizations win.

What is Hyperautomation?

While it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, hyperautomation is a pretty straightforward concept. It's a thorough strategy for using a variety of advanced technologies to automate business practices. Essentially, it's a force multiplier that is especially valuable when dealing with complex operations. In travel and expense management, it can lead to opportunities for substantial cost savings and efficiency gains.

Typically, hyperautomation uses a mix of artificial intelligence and machine learning plus other technologies such as robotic process automation to create a more powerful form of automation than is usually seen. By automating as many business processes as possible at one time, you can create a more integrated system and ensure complex tasks get performed correctly with the minimum amount of human activity.

How Hyperautomation Impacts Corporate Travel and Expense Management

Managing travel and expenses for a company has historically been very manual driven. Think about a common scenario: A conference gets scheduled. You need to coordinate travel bookings for people in the organization. They get reimbursed for lodging, food etc. In many cases, they must keep all of these paper receipts for the duration of the trip and then submit them (along with yet another manual report) when they return. It's a long, messy process that invites errors and delays. When those manual reports are submitted, they go through a manual review and approval process, which can be mired with delays. As a result, employees may be left waiting weeks or longer for reimbursement of their expenses. 

Now imagine that same scenario but with one major exception: We automate everything possible. Instead of carrying around a pile of old crumpled receipts, workers can use their phone to instantly submit an image of the receipt. Then, reimbursements get automatically approved based on pre-set policies that govern how much can be spent and where/how it can be spent.

SAP Concur makes this kind of automation simple. By making a broadly manual process automatic, it can save countless hours of headaches and frustration, reduce errors, and help save time and money.

Usually adopting hyperautomation starts with something called "intelligent process discovery," which uses analytics to pinpoint bottlenecks and significant inefficiencies. By using AI, you can analyze important patterns in many areas (think approvals, reimbursements, bookings or even vendor contracts) and determine where automation can have the most profound impact.

Hyperautomated systems also provide a serious compliance edge, as they can detect and flag violations of policies as they occur. They make it easy to ensure receipts are legitimate and they can cross-references spending vs policy limits. Another problem that often arises is the need to juggle regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Here, hyperautomation can be a differentiator, as it makes it easy to reconcile any differences and stay compliant across all relevant jurisdictions. Finally, human error is rife in manual systems, so the ability of hyperautomation to limit such errors is highly attractive.

Let's take a closer look at another component of hyperautomation: Intelligent document processing. This process is used to extract data quickly and accurately from documents (such as receipts) and validate it. The means you can categorize your expenses automatically and derive real, actionable insight from what otherwise would be reams of raw data.

Hyperautomation also uses real-time analytics to do things such as budget forecasting, performance tracking (including vendors), and spending analysis.

Unlocking Real Business Value

Now that we've talked about how hyperautomation works, let's make the case for it as a business investment. Organizations are always seeking to create more operational efficiency, especially in areas that are highly manual. Hyperautomation lowers processing time, streamlines approvals, automates reconciliation, and reduces the need for manual data entry. In other words, it can lead to radical efficiency upgrades.

The bottom line is another factor to consider. Automated flows lower processing costs, often significantly. Just think about how much less time you can spend chasing down documents and performing manual approvals. By automating policies, you can improve enforcement of things such as spending limits. After all, if the charge falls outside of the limit, it simply gets denied. Deeper insight into analytics means you have the data to optimize your negotiations with vendors, and potentially get better terms. Finally, automation also reduces fraud and non-compliance risks and the financial losses that can occur as a result.

Here's one more benefit of hyperautomation that isn't so easily reduced to a number: Employee satisfaction. Workers hate complicated expense reporting and long waits to get reimbursed. Administrators hate having to hunt things down and keep track of countless categories. By using hyperautomation, all of these headaches go away. Morale improves and it becomes easier to retain your most valued workers.

What to Know When Implementing Hyperautomation

To successfully implement hyperautomation in expense and travel management, organizations should consider:

First, identify which areas would benefit most from automation. Anything low value, repetitive, time-consuming or based on rules should be fair game. Next, you'll want to choose a software partner that offers all the various hyperautomation tools and technologies we've discussed above. SAP Concur leverages all of those technologies to create a powerful solution for introducing the benefits of hyperautomation into your organizational operations.

Once deployed, you can use continuous monitoring to benchmark your progress and identify ongoing opportunities for further improvement. This is important, as it helps build a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring you stay one step ahead of the competition. 

The Takeaway

If you want to gain stronger control over spending, make your workers happier, and help foster a culture of operational excellence, then there are few more impactful moves than introducing hyperautomation into your organization.

While hyperautomation is a newer concept, SAP Concur has a long track record of empowering businesses with AI and automation. Through our experience supporting over 46,000 companies in their journey to increased efficiency, we’ve learned lessons that can help your business save time and money through automation.

If you think your organization is ready to make this kind of change, visit our website to learn more about what SAP Concur.