Company: Lucent Technologies
2003 U.S. booked air volume: $27 million
Headquarters: Murray Hill, N.J.
Telecommunications giant Lucent Technologies in the past four years has fully automated and rolled out a common expense reporting system to a globally scattered employee base and consolidated corporate payment through its first global charge card contract. Lucent continues to fine-tune its payment and expense management processes, which it has standardized in 37 countries, comprising 90 percent of its global employee base.
Manager of global card services Adrienne White said the company in 1998 embarked on the arduous task by evaluating various electronic expense reporting platforms. Replacing disparate practices in various regions, Lucent in 1999 launched Concur Technologies' XMS in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. White said the company applied the "big bang approach" to roll out the system. Within three years, she said, Lucent deployed the congruous expense reporting platform to an additional 14 countries on its way to the current total of 37.
White said Lucent continues to witness all the benefits of a common expense reporting system across the globe, from streamlined submission and approval to increased compliance. Although Lucent implemented a global travel policy, the system is programmed to track local business rules that apply only to travelers in certain regions—flagging out-of-policy expenses in accordance with such rules.
Lucent also took a unified approach to globalize its T&E card program. American Express has long been the company's U.S. preferred T&E card supplier, but it wasn't until 2002 that Lucent moved to a single contract for all cards on a global level. The company issued Amex cards to more than 28,000 cardholders worldwide. White said the standardized payment platform across the company has increased compliance and card use, maximized the visibility of card spend, while minimizing credit losses to past due accounts.
Lucent also moved swiftly following a decision made last September to "consolidate global operational support" of American Express and Concur from a single location. Late last year, Lucent began to shift support and processing of electronic expense reports as well as the management of the company's Amex transactions from five regional centers to what White described as "a single U.S. hub" in Alpharetta, Ga. The move helped streamline the expense process both for travelers and managers, while trimming expense management staff by 35 percent, according to White. Yet, as Lucent continues to streamline operations, "we estimate an additional 5 percent reduction after remaining deployments are complete," she said. Although the company has consolidated most components of expense management in the United States, White said Lucent retains regional shared service centers in various countries for "receipt handling and compliance."
Additionally, Lucent included such components as offline expense reporting modules and receipt imaging. "For receipt compliance, we moved to an imaging platform," White said. "Before, they just submitted paper receipts with their expense reports." The company selected German imaging service provider IXOS Software for receipt submission. While the imaging program has been a success in the United States, White said the company has been unable to roll the system out globally as it must comply with various tax requirements in other countries. "Outside of the U.S., countries still require paper receipts, but the laws may change," White said. Meanwhile, Lucent last year launched a mobile client solution, which enables employees to create expense reports offline and submit reports once online access is re-established. Given the complexity of local tax rules around the world, Lucent opted to outsource the management of value added tax retrieval to Meridian, a VAT recovery service provider. White said Lucent has yielded concrete savings through international tax refunds, while shifting the heavy lifting to Meridian. "We let Meridian handle it all," she said.
Outsourcing is not new to Lucent. While the company can boast in-house management of a sophisticated T&E expense process, in 2000 the company outsourced procurement and travel to Colorado Springs, Colo.-based business process outsourcing firm Alliente Inc.
(BTN, Oct. 30, 2000), which Ariba acquired early this year
(BTN, Jan. 19). While the Alliente entity continues to provide guidance on policy, supplier relations and program management, it still is up to Lucent to decide the overall strategic direction of its travel program.