RiskMetrics Group, Inc. Michael Ciaccio
"By combining both the travel and expense suite together it allows us to one, administer employees in one single location rather than having to manage it in two separate locations. It also helps to mandate that our employees should be using a single travel agent and allows them to see the benefits of having their data coming from one system into the expense system and it allows for the ease of reporting. Also, it allows us to get an idea of our company spend a lot better. Something that we’re trying to do this year is focus on the numbers and start crunching them down with the use of also the intelligence tool."
"Having the ability to just open up a browser whether the employee’s traveling somewhere. I know myself I was traveling a lot last year so being able to sit down in a hotel room and starting to create an expense report and get everything together even before charges started to hit my set-up within Concur, that’s a big benefit just being able to do it from anywhere and actually it minimizes the excuses that our employees can make that they can’t put together their expense reports because as long as they have a lap top and a browser, that shouldn’t be a concern. It’s helped us streamline our processes where it, obviously it’s not a very heavy paper process any longer. As the work flow goes it just helps to improve our work flow overall. There’s no more faxing, emailing, printing out of reports. No more storage of reports and taking up filing space. Within our office right now we’ve consolidated some of our finance offices into one space, so if we had to print out all these expense reports we probably wouldn’t have any more room for employees."
"Overall it’s taken a broken process that we had five years ago and helped us put it into a format where the employee knows when they submit a report they know who it’s going to, they know who it’s being reviewed by and they know when it’s going to get paid and submitted back to them for reimbursement and also pay back to the credit card. If you haven’t integrated I’m not sure what you’re waiting for. Just having one place of administration for employee information that flows into two different systems is extremely helpful. To be able to create expense reports as soon as you develop an itinerary and having it out there for you is a big benefit. Seeing the data that’s out there from, being able to compare it to here’s what my itinerary said, here’s what the corporate card said and just having it by just waving a mouse over that particular piece of data is very beneficial and something that I think all companies should strive to do."
"The biggest surprise that we’ve seen so far, it’s actually the lack of pushback we get from the employees might be the biggest response. When we initially rolled it out there was a lot of griping and moaning and “Oh why do we have to do this?” Because we actually, the finance department, used to prepare expense reports for our employees so this was a total change of a culture at our company but as we’ve grown, as we’ve done acquisitions, we’ve gone from a 300 person company to a 1,300 person company so they’ve noticed that these are things that are required to be a growing company. And the scalability of the system allows us to do the things that we want to do outside the finance department, so I think the biggest surprise is the lack of push back we actually get internally from employees because they understand it’s a need process."
"I am very thankful to have the opportunity be able to come to these conferences and I think we at RiskMetrics, we try to pride ourselves on being one step ahead on what the industry is looking for and I can respect that Concur does the same thing on their end."