Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. Natalie McGrady
"Well Concur makes our lives easier because we are able to integrate travel and expense into one tool. We are able to not only see how people are booking and when they’re booking travel, but also on the expense side be able to reconcile those expenses so on the back end it goes into AP already reconciled and approved. We pay our corporate card based on the information out of Concur and settle our GL that way as well so it is a very great tool for us. Some of the top benefits we receive are travel policy enforcement. We’re able to drive when and how people book travel so that is a part of our travel policy. We also are able to manage our out of pocket expenses for the travel policy enforcement and our vendor selection."
"The ability to see the travel, the ticket. Our travelers can go in and look at their itinerary, past, present and future. They can also see what expense reports were tied to that travel itinerary and then be able to replicate that information. So from a travel tool stand point we’re able to build templates and we’re also able to find out what we did before and how we allocated it. We also can book guest travelers so if your spouse is going with you or if you have interviewees coming in, candidates, you can utilize that as well. Meetings, you can book the meeting in so there’s a lot of huge opportunities that you can use in the benefits of using Concur Travel & Expense."
"The benefits of having a solution online and on demand is because it is very flexible. It’s a very flexible tool to configure as well as flexible to change and so once you’re set up it doesn’t mean that you can never go back and change your expense types. It doesn’t mean that you can’t go back and change work flow of how the travelers get their expense reports approved. The benefits of having it on demand is there’s 24 hour support you can call in or send an email to so there’s always something that you can do with the tool and you’re never locked in stone so that’s what we like about it."
"The savings you can see if you manage through a corporate card you will see an increase through your rebate because what Concur does, it makes it so much easier for your travelers to utilize the travel tool that they will start to use their corporate card more."
"Control and compliance is very big especially with your vendors so making sure their rates are loaded and loaded correctly is very, very important so working with your agency partner if you use an agency partner to make sure those, your GDS information is up to date and current and the right information is there is very important. So the compliance of utilizing those vendors, then being able to drive your pricing based on that is very important and where you don’t utilize those vendors you will see immediately what the price differential is and so if our vendors that we have agreements with are higher we can go back to them and say this is why people aren’t using you and if they’re lower, we go back to people who are out of compliance and have that discussion as well. We also see very quickly with the e-receipts if our policy and one of our policies is that you do not fill up gas at the car rental company, you fill up prior to returning the car. We see immediately if someone did that and so especially if that vendor is on e-receipts, which is very, very good. So that’s a travel report where it used to be you could only run that on the expense side."
"So we used to tape receipts onto pieces of paper and put them all together, print out the Excel spread sheet, get it signed, walk it through the whole nine and very cumbersome, very time consuming for not only for the traveler but also the approver and AP. So when we switched to Concur we were able to streamline that process, fax in our receipts at first, now you can scan and attach which is a wonderful tool, but you still have the option to do both and that has been a much more efficient process and way of managing your expenses. So you always know where your expenses every step of the way so you always can go on and see."
"There’s always more than you think and that was one of the big things is that there’s a meetings tool that is awesome with Concur that in the past you had to pay a third party meetings consultant of things that you already do today like you keep your manifest, you do it all in Excel. Now you can do it all on Concur on Cliqbook. The other thing is on meetings, there could be five meetings going on that same week. You don’t know until after you’ve booked your meeting and then someone says, you have a meeting and I have a meeting and I have the same people. Now you can see those meetings are all populated into a central calendar. I mean things like that are just things you don’t even think about as another benefit to utilizing Concur."
"Concur is much more than a travel and expense company. They are a partner. And I think that people who are employed by Concur really care about their customers and they want to drive change and not just change for the sake of making the dollar but change that’s really going to help us in the long run. Help our travelers."
"Well the good thing about the reporting is that you not only as the travel manager can see the reporting, but also the managers can see it as well so if you’re user group is a savvy user group they can go in and see how their travelers are utilizing their trips. If they’re making sure that they are spending in the right parameters. If someone is supposed to be working in a certain market you can go in and do that travel, run those reports as well. What we see also is the fact that on the travel side, I can see immediately if someone’s out of policy by the audit rules that pop up and I can get a report based on those out of policy issues."
"Concur customer support is probably top notch I mean I really do feel it’s a very accessible customer support team. When you call in and if you’re during your implementation process, you have an implementation team that works with you all the way through and then they hand you over to customer support and it’s just not a dump and run kind of process. They actually sit down with you, go through a phone call with you, work with you to make sure you know who your, who leads the customer support team. They’ll talk to how the process works and I’ve never had any problems. You always know who you can call. If you feel like you may not be getting the answer quick enough, I’ve always loved working with customer support."
"What I tell people who have not automated travel and expense is that it is a life saver. At times during travel you feel like drowning, you can’t seem to get a handle on what’s going on. There is information feeds coming in from your agency, from the airlines, from the rental car companies, from the expense tool and then you’re able to control your destiny by putting in CTE. And when I mean control your destiny is you are feeding your profile information from one way. So all your profile information comes from Concur and it goes into travel and it goes to your agency if you’re using one. So now with CTE everything is a one way sink. The agency doesn’t come into your profile. You tell them what to populate and that is a huge, huge benefit for everyone. So if you’ve ever done travel you’ll know what I’m talking about. And the fact that you get your alerts for your profile, your credit card is expiring, your passport is expired or getting ready to, you have immunization on there. All of that is a huge benefit from a visibility stand point. The cost savings come from the increased rebate that you’ll see. The cost savings come from the utilization of the tool, the online tool versus full service so there’s always a significant cost savings there and the cost savings come from your vendor-partner relationships."