Digitising Expense Claims for Vendors and Employees

Project Details

A reputed on-trend fashion jewellery brand with a presence in multiple countries was struggling with how they manage expense claims. The existing process varied across regions and used different platforms starting from electronic platforms to paper-based claim forms. Needless to say, the process in place involved manual effort and caused unnecessary delays in creating expense claims, managing them, approving associated payments, and transferring reimbursable amounts to employee bank accounts. Such inefficiency had a negative impact on employees and the brand image as well.

Project Goals

The customer was eager to digitise the expense claim process in order to make the claim creation and payment process seamless for employees and the company respectively. Some of the main goals were:

• To establish an end-to-end digitised process for expense claims by providing a web and mobile platform that could be utilised by employees whilst travelling
• To automate the claim process with an enterprise application seamlessly connected with the finance system
• To design the process flow from the end-user perspective and expedite the expense claim process
• To migrate the previous expense claim data to the new platform

Project Completion

NeeVista’s experience in helping businesses integrate digital technologies with their business process has been key to project success. The consultants at NeeVista believe in a value-driven approach that puts a relentless focus on the customer. Therefore, they divided the project into three crucial stages.

• New Digital Value Proposition: The first step was to set clear expectations among all the stakeholders regarding the application-driven approach to automate claims creation and payment process.
• End-to-end Digitisation: This step involved a successful redesign of the expense claim management process that benefits both the company and end-users. NeeVista consultants used their expertise and domain knowledge to unleash truly transformative ideas during this step. They had to ensure that the solution is simple, easy to use, and reduces manual effort.
• Enabling Innovative Journeys: This step was all about bringing the transformation to life. After deciding to integrate the company’s Oracle Financial System with Oracle Fusion Expenses, NeeVista consultants worked on the solution blueprint to make the entire claim creation, employee cash advance for business expenses, approval, and payment process seamless. This also included designing the credit card integration with the Expense module to seamlessly capture credit card transactions. 

Project Challenges

Some of the challenges that the NeeVista consultants faced and successfully navigated during this project were:

• Data Migration from Different Sources: There was no central platform with the details of migrating users, their line managers, and accurate bank information. Maintaining accuracy while collecting data from different sources and spreadsheets was certainly a big task.
• Creating Multilingual User Guides: Creating multilingual user guides for end users across countries was another challenge that the consultants faced.
• Testing and Configuration: Another key challenge was to configure and test the end to end process for various scenarios such as expense claim creation, claim approval, accounts payable (AP) invoice creation, and so on. 

Project Results

The Jewellery brand was successfully able to go live with the new expense claim management process, thanks to the efficiency of NeeVista consultants. The customer was extremely pleased to make the expense claim process seamless across regions and offer an improved user experience. Moreover, they immediately started to experience the benefits of the gained efficiencies from automated claim processing in the Accounts Payable department. 

The intuitive and automated solution provided by NeeVista enabled the client to streamline the expense claim management process including claim creation, claim approval, and payment. The new solution reduced the need for manual intervention and provided the customer with insightful analytical data reporting as well.