Client Success Stories

The problem

• Lack of structure around corporate travel policies
• Weekly, calendar-based expense system
• Employees required to manage paper expense reporting solution
• Manual processing of expense reports
• Separate tools for travel booking and expense reporting

The solution

• On-demand, end-to-end travel and expense management solution
• One-click functionality automatically pre-populates travel information in the expense report
• Audit feature automatically flags expenses that are not in compliance
• Automated pre-population and calculation of foreign exchange rates

The benefits

• Savings of nearly 80 percent per filed expense report
• Seamless expense reporting solution across all organizations
• Increase in policy awareness and compliance
• Ability to audit T&E throughout the entire company
• 100 percent employee adoption rate
• High employee and management satisfaction

Since 1976 Liz Claiborne, Inc. has been providing men and women with apparel,
accessories and fragrance products. The company offers consumers quality brands
for every lifestyle with wholesale and retail locations across the globe.

Being buried in a stack of unnecessary manual expense reports was enough to
convince the leadership at Liz Claiborne, Inc. to evaluate their travel booking and
expense reporting process. Their expense reporting method was paper-based,
creating a constant flow of documents, both for business travelers and those
processing reports. One of the main components driving this mass of paper was the
company’s weekly, calendar-based expense reporting time-frame.

It went by week, so if somebody traveled three weeks in a row, there would be three
expense reports for just one trip,” said Rafael Rosario, Liz Claiborne’s global travel
services manager.

Not only did this labor-intensive process neglect to meet the needs of travelers, it
also put Liz Claiborne at risk for leakage. Employees were failing to comply with
corporate travel policies, but without a standardized expense system in place, no
auditing or policy control was in effect for Liz Claiborne travelers. As a result, items
such as airport lounge memberships were being expensed, costing the organization
unwarranted amounts of money.

With more than 30 brands spanning three continents, Liz Claiborne was in search
of a travel and expense management solution that was more universal and efficient
than their paper-based process. The company was also in-need of a solution that
would incorporate corporate policies to enforce employee expense compliance. One
instance of service was crucial for Liz Claiborne, in order to serve its employees’
diverse language and business needs around the world.

With hopes of increasing compliance with its corporate travel policy along with
a more efficient and effective expense reporting process, Liz Claiborne’s vision
closely matched that of Concur® Travel & Expense, an end-to-end travel booking
and expense reporting solution. Liz Claiborne looked to Concur’s unified service to
streamline the entire travel and expense reporting process for the company. Using
Concur’s on-demand travel booking and expense management solution, travelers
within Liz Claiborne’s global organization can now access the solution anytime,
anywhere – to both book their travel and submit their expense reports.

Since implementing Concur’s travel booking and expense reporting service,
productivity has increased for travelers, as expense reports can now be filed on
a per-trip basis, rather than a per-week basis. As a result, leadership at Liz
Claiborne saw a significant decline in the amount of paperwork being shuffled
between departments.

Employee compliance with corporate card policies increased to 90 percent
since implementing the solution. Now, Liz Claiborne is able to prevent outof-
policy transactions from taking place before they occur as a result of
Concur’s consistent corporate policy enforcement. In addition, Concur
enables the company to reimburse out-of-pocket expenses within 48 to
72 hours, rather than the nearly two weeks it took for reimbursement when
Liz Claiborne used a manual travel and expense process.

“It gives visibility to the traveler,” Rosario said. “There is functionality
in Concur called ‘one click’ that allows you to pre-populate all the
information from the travel into the expense tool automatically.”
Because Concur’s one-click functionality is easy to use and makes the end-to-end
travel and expense process seamless, it encourages employee adoption of the
online travel booking tool, which has gone from 50 percent to 82 percent
after implementing Concur. This helps drive policy compliance, and it is this
functionality, according to Rosario, that played a role in Liz Claiborne’s decision to
implement Concur.

With Liz Claiborne’s overall increase of compliance, productivity and control, it’s
clear that not only has Concur helped the organization save money, but the
intuitive tools have also helped to increase employee satisfaction. The travel booking
and expense reporting experience is now a much simpler process that requires less
frequent expense reports. Concur’s end-toend service has helped Liz Claiborne truly
take control of their corporate travel and expense management process.

“Concur has streamlined the travel booking and expense reporting process for us,
increasing productivity with employees,”
Rosario said. “Now, completing the expense reporting process is just a click
away. Because of our success with Concur in the US, we’re rolling out the end-to-end
solution in Canada and Asia right now, and are planning to roll out the solution in
Europe in the future.”