Crown Corporation

The problem

• Manual travel and entertainment (T&E) expense entry process was error prone and time-consuming for employees and internal accounting staff.
• Improper coding of entries and mis-keyed information forced accounting staff to check and correct hundreds of expense reports per month.
• Crown Central's finance department functioned without any real intelligence regarding their T&E expenditures.

The solution

• Crown Central chose Concur's service delivery model, as they required a best-of-breed automated expense reports solution - without upfront fees.
• Crown Central can process more expense reports utilizing less internal resources.
• Fully automated expense reporting procedures ensure greater accuracy, while rules-based parameters automatically enforce expense compliance.

The benefits

• Crown Central has realized an over 300% savings for each expense report processed since implementing Concur Expense.
• Accounting headcount required to process expense reports has been reduced, while the volume of expense reports continues to increase.
• Dramatically reduced time spent by employees creating, tracking, and managing T&E expense reports.
• With the ASP delivery model, Crown Central always has the latest version of Concur Expense at their fingertips.

Jim Smith, the accounts payable manager for Crown Central Petroleum Corporation - a leading independent refiner and marketer of petroleum products - understands well the futility and headaches associated with repeatedly performing mundane, thankless tasks. An employer for more than 3,000 people across eight states, Crown Central was in search of an affordable, automated T&E expense management solution that was robust enough to meet its current needs yet flexible enough to accommodate future growth.

"Our old expense reporting process was a real mess," confesses Smith. "We relied on an assortment of disparate processes including paper-based expense reports, spreadsheet templates, and a paper trail that was rife with coding and reporting errors." After a careful evaluation, Crown Central determined that Concur Expense offered the most comprehensive automated solution and decided that Concur's ASP delivery model would best suit their needs - and their budget.

However, Concur Expense wasn't the first automated expense reports solution to roll across the desktops of Crown Central. As early as 1996, Crown Central recognized the need for automated expense reporting and decided to leverage an email-based expense reporting application. Unfortunately, that experiment quickly buckled under itself when it became apparent that distribution was only half of the problem. A comprehensive expense reporting system also required a fully integrated workflow process, automated controls and audits, and robust reporting.

"We quickly understood that while email is an ideal delivery vehicle for electronic reports, it needs to be attached to a solid workflow process. In our case, an approval process was never integrated into the system, so reports would be submitted without the proper manager approval and confusion reigned. In the end, we decided to scrap the system and return to our paper-based roots," said Smith.

But Crown Central had tasted the potential of Web-based expense reporting and understood that it needed to find the right T&E solution for its needs. By the summer of 2000, Crown Central decided to try its luck again and chose Concur Expense as their new automated T&E expense management solution. "Concur was the only vendor that provided an ASP delivery model with the functionality that could meet our T&E expense management needs," stated Smith. By September, a small pilot program was in the works. "We've been burned before and decided that a small pilot program for 30 to 60 days would benefit everyone involved. We evaluated everything from the speed of the application over a dial-up connection to reporting functionality on the back-end. Within a month we rolled it out to the rest of the company and the result was an extremely smooth implementation process," continued Smith.

Filing an automated expense report now just takes a few clicks for Crown Central employees. Concur Expense resides on the Company's Intranet and is also accessible via the Internet, making it truly convenient for all employees. All expense data is now seamlessly entered into pre-defined spending categories, while the approval process is fully integrated into Crown Central's workflow process. But clearly, the most compelling results for Crown Central have been the dramatic return on investment realized since implementing Concur Expense. Prior to deploying Concur Expense, processing each expense report cost approximately $20 per report. That cost has since plummeted to less than $6 per report.

"The money we've saved since deploying Concur Expense has nearly covered our initial investment. But cutting our processing costs is only the most conspicuous benefit. Our next priority is to analyze and leverage our expense data and bring some real intelligence to the expense reporting process," concluded Smith.