In part 1 of this article, I covered the annual Concur Fusion event and some of the announcements made around the new Concur App Center, Open Booking and The Perfect Trip Fund. Today’s piece will continue to highlight some of new capabilities that Concur is looking to deliver to its customers including updates around Concur’s Invoice Management solution.
ConTgo
In early March, 2013, Concur acquired ConTgo, a cloud-based mobile communications and messaging platform focused on the travel industry. Concur plans to offer ConTgo’s capabilities to help their clients enhance their Duty of Care responsibilities and help travel managers stay connected provide better services to travelers. Using a travelers profile and booking information from Concur travel, this messaging platform will be able to track where a traveler is and have a method to reach them via the email/text capabilities within ConTgo. The platform also has search capabilities to locate where employees are by date, region, airport, etc. Concur plans to expand ConTgo’s capabilities throughout the T&E Cloud providing partners access to the platform.
A great example of how this capability is useful is when business travelers are checking in to a preferred hotel. In order to provide the right information and the right time, a travel manager can decide to send the traveler a message informing them that wifi and breakfast are included in the corporate rate. This provides timely and relevant information to the traveler and ensures that negotiated discounts are taken full advantage of.
Concur Big Data
Big Data is the term used to describe a massive volume (think extabytes = 1 million terabytes) of unstructured and structured data that is difficult to manage and understand using traditional database or analytical tools. Concur has a lot of travel and expense data, 20 million users worth of data. The idea behind Concur Big Data is to leverage this large volume of date to help drive compliance, provide integrated benchmarks and provide recommendations to travelers based on historical usage. Concur plans to provide integrated benchmark information to travel managers (e.g., expected airfare for city pairs) and to users at the point of booking (e.g., red flag when booking a fare that is 20% over the benchmark rate).
Travel Points
With this feature customers will be able to introduce the concept of gamification to the management of their travel program. Gamification is the use of game thinking, design and mechanics in a non-game context in order to engage users – a great example of gamification is a frequent flyer program. Similar to a rewards program, the business travelers of participating customers will be able to accumulate “Travel Points”. For example, if a user books a flight that is $100 below the benchmark price, they will earn 10 travel points which can be redeemed at a later point to book a fair that is over the benchmark price. The idea with this type of feature is to provide the traveler more control over what they spend on while also providing incentives to stay in compliance.
Concur Invoice
And last but certainly not least is Concur Invoice. Our previous discussion of Concur Invoice focused on its Invoice Standard product which is aimed at the mid-market. Today, I wanted to very briefly share some of the highlights of the Concur Invoice Management Pro Edition. This edition covers the end-to-end invoice process including and the following shows how the solution maps to Ardent’s ePayables Framework:
- Receive – Suppliers can submit eInvoices via EDI or other formats or through the OB10 Supplier Network. Paper/PDF/emailed invoices can go through a scanning and data capture process, Concur also offers an Invoice Capture Service to do this on behalf of its customers.
- Process – The solution includes automated approval routing and workflow complete with configurable rules around matching and validation of invoice information. Concur can import purchase orders (PO’s) for matching through a standard web service or pre-defined batch process. Users have flexibility with rule set-up, e.g., different rules can be set-up for goods versus services or based on region. Also, users have the ability to process invoices straight-through if conditions are met or automatically route an invoice to a specific person.
- Pay – Invoices can be paid via Concur using ACH or checks. Payments can now be made in USD, GBP, Euro and Canadian Dollars (via check)
Also worth mentioning is the mobile capabilities available to users via Concur Mobile. Concur Mobile users are able to manage invoice and check request approvals from their mobile device.
What’s Next for Concur Invoice?
There are a few areas that Concur is working on to extend the capabilities of its Invoice management offering. Some of these include:
- Ability to request and create a PO, making Concur the system of record and simplifying the PO matching functionality.
- A service to help customers through the process of automating AP. This will include administrative and support desk activities, access to expertise where needed and guidance around optimizing business rules and invoice processing.
- Enhanced Capture – Integrating data capture and Concur Invoice (at the moment it is two separate systems) allowing the invoice image and the captured data to be viewed side-by-side. Extend capture capabilities to Chinese and Japanese.
