Pfizer Halves Expensing Costs

Pfizer Halves Expensing Costs


Name: Phil Dunphy

Company: Pfizer Inc.

Headquarters: New York, N.Y.

Total T&E: $600 million

Innovation: Selecting and implementing a global automated solution that cuts expense processing costs in half


With 8,500 Concur XMS users, Pfizer Inc. is well on its way toward rolling out its electronic expense reporting system worldwide. The global pharmaceutical company anticipates having 10,000 employees on Concur by mid-year and all 20,000 U.S.-based employees on it by year-end.

"It will improve service, processes and hopefully significantly reduce costs," said Phil Dunphy, senior manager of global travel. Dunphy said the Concur system is bringing process costs down to $25, and even below $20, from the process cost of a paper-based report, which averages $56. The system also produces a cleaner document and a centralized database of actual spend, which will provide better value in understanding T&E for budgeting and compliance. "If you look at the history of travel management, the travel manager's best information was agency data. Moving to a corporate card was far more robust," said Dunphy. "But this gives actual approved-spend information."

The project took off in 1998, after Pfizer's IT department bought and licensed the Quick Expense product. Ironically, travel and IT at that time reported to the same vice president, but Dunphy had known nothing about the purchase of the product. "It was a Band-Aid really, just a spreadsheet that still required manual entry," he said. Dunphy said he could find a more functional product that would offer better cost savings, and put together a team to do just that. "We went out and looked at the new level of T&E automation. We were going to go with American Express Expense Manager but the day we made the decision, they decided to shelve the product," he said. "We decided on Concur because it was easy, neat and had a good user interface."

Pfizer in September 1998 licensed the software from Concur and rolled out a live version first to its global research development team in May '99. "The research community is designed to investigate and ask questions and they gave us a tremendous amount of feedback," said Dunphy. The solution last year was rolled out at Pfizer headquarters, then to the first group of former employees of Warner-Lambert, which Pfizer acquired last June. Pfizer this quarter will implement Concur in its Ann Arbor, Mich., and Morris Plains, N.J., offices and then roll out the solution to its field force, who will have access to a disconnected Web version enabling them to file expense reports while on the road.

Pfizer also has approved the product as a global solution. The United Kingdom is evaluating it, and discussions are well underway with Japan, but Dunphy said language is a barrier in Japan as well as in Canada, where the software must be deployed in French and English. Meanwhile, the company over the holidays moved from XMS version 4.2 to 6.2, which was added to the corporate intranet site. Dunphy said the upgrades are primarily physical, with cleaner real estate, a better user interface and better functionality.

Pfizer currently gets a feed from the American Express corporate card, which prepopulates the expense report. Pfizer also could have downloads from its agencies, American Express and WorldTravel BTI, now that itineraries are issued electronically, and eventually from an online booking tool, which is on tap for this year. Warner-Lambert already had contracted with GetThere Inc., but had not yet implemented the tool. Dunphy said Pfizer this year is going to reevaluate that piece for the combined company.

Pfizer later this year also will initiate an internal benchmarking project comparing corporate card spending with the general ledger, which receives a customized feed from XMS. The process is fully automated so when employees file reports, their approving managers receive e-mails that can go into the system to approve the expense report. The system, which has been customized, will red-flag items that are outside of policy and the manager can fully approve, decline or line-item veto the report, after which the employee is notified via e-mail. The program also indicates which items require receipts, based on the policy that receipts are required only for more than $75.

Pfizer is moving to a policy of no receipts as long as it is on the corporate card. "We are going to test it with the field force, which is 99 percent domestic travel," said Dunphy. "For international travel, we are asking for a lot more receipts for the value-added tax." Travelers still will have to submit the hotel folio with breakdowns of spend by type. Said Dunphy, "There still are issues to resolve until we get totally paperless, but it has given us a far better way of tracking receipts.