Oversight had the opportunity to participate in the Concur Ignite 2015 sales kickoff last week in Bellevue, Washington. Concur is a strategic Oversight partner, so the Ignite meeting is an excellent opportunity for us to connect with our Concur counterparts and catch up on new initiatives and plans. It’s also a great opportunity for us to connect with other Concur partners and share experiences.
What is so exciting about working with Concur is their track record of innovation and leadership. When their competitors were talking about automating expenses, Concur was focused on the relationship between booking travel and managing expenses in an integrated system. When their competitors caught up to Concur with solutions to combine travel bookings and expense management, Concur had already moved on to focusing on how to provide insights into open bookings. Continuing this tradition of innovation and leadership, Concur is still focused on helping its customers leverage the data that exists within their travel and expense management systems.
Concur customers have a goldmine of data available to them in their Concur Expense systems. And this data can be used for a variety of purposes. Some of these purposes are available directly from within Concur Expense or through other Concur offerings. But a number of values exist outside of Concur offerings, which is why Concur developed the App Center partner program to leverage the Concur Platform and unlock the data within it. Data is the key value driver for Concur customers and its ready availability is a huge advantage for Concur over other expense management solutions. We spent a lot of time last week going over the value of Concur data and the various ways this data can be leveraged by Concur customers.
Oversight Insights On Demand is one of the “Apps for My Company” that leverages the Concur Platform to help companies automate their compliance process on top of the automated expense management system they already have in place with Concur. Even the best-run organizations have a small percentage of errors, waste, and abuse. It’s hard for approving managers to catch “cheaters”, and knowing this causes the bad actors take advantage.
The Oversight solution is enabled by the Concur Platform and App Center Partnership to automatically analyze 100% of expense and to catch a lot of this non-compliant spending that is falling through the cracks. The Concur Platform allows for Oversight to access a company’s Concur Expense data with less than ten minutes of effort on the part of the Concur customer. Once enabled, Oversight can acquire the company’s expense report data and provide behavior-based results within hours. Better, this connection between Concur and Oversight automates the process on an ongoing basis so that automated compliance monitoring continues without any IT or other involvement required of the Concur customer. With less than ten minutes of setup, Concur customers can be in a position to begin reducing non-compliant transactions by as much as 70% in the first six months, reduce spending related to errors, waste, and abuse by 2%-5% of the total travel budget, while reducing the level of effort related to compliance monitoring by over 50%.
This is a great example of the power of the Concur Platform. Other travel and expense management systems can require days of customer IT effort and weeks of elapsed time to automate the data acquisition process. This makes it simple and easy for Concur customers to leverage the power of other great App Center solutions like Taxback International for recovering VAT payments, Replicon for integrating time tracking, and Visage Mobile for monitoring mobile device spending. In the end, it’s all about the data and Concur makes it easy for companies like ours to turn that data into value for Concur customers.
Concur Ignite 2015 was a great opportunity for us to further our partnership and discuss ways we can both bring value to both Concur and Oversight customers. Now we’re anxiously looking forward to Concur Fusion in March!
