Software provider SAP this month enhanced its cloud-based travel and expense product Cloud for Travel and Expense tool through new integrations and the development of an HTML5-based mobile user interface.
Since launching SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense about two years ago, SAP Cloud senior director of product marketing Neil Krefsky claimed the company has added "a little over 60" customers, including Fortune 500 clients and "a few major, well-known" companies. "We've been basically picking up two customers a month since the product launched," he said.
"Our [contribution] to supporting travel and expense management is covering the entire lifecycle of the business trip for customers," Krefsky said. "We're really focused on the different audiences of a company, like the business traveler, but also enabling the finance or procurement office to better control travel costs and better enforce corporate travel policy."
To simplify company compliance with the United States Physician Payments Sunshine Act, Cloud for Travel and Expense now integrates with MedProID, a practitioner database, allowing users to retrieve "up-to-date identity information," according to SAP. The act, which went into effect in March, is designed to increase transparency of financial relationships between doctors and pharmaceutical and medical companies by requiring meeting managers to report what Krefsky referred to as "any transfer of value made to a physician or healthcare practitioner," such as dinners, along with a physician's identification information.
MedProID, created by healthcare license solutions company MedPro Systems, contains 13 million records of practitioners and organization licensing information, according to its website. Similar to a traveler assigning attendees to a dinner receipt within a company's own system, Cloud for Travel and Expense users now can attach to an expense report physician information from the MedProID Database, including addresses and identification numbers.
"Now it's seamless," Krefsky said. "You're actually pulling information from the MedProID database."
Meanwhile, SAP also now enables users—travelers, approvers or auditors—to automatically itemize such expenses as hotel bills, airfares or noncorporate credit card items into a single group, according to Krefsky. "On the admin side, for example, they can itemize all things that have scanned images, attachments or cash submissions," he explained.
Cloud for Travel and Expense now is compatible with HTML5, which runs natively in online browsers without additional browser plug-ins or installation requirements, according to SAP.
"[HTML5] is really a much more efficient technology and better for customers, and it's where cloud development is going," said Krefsky.
Due to a "growing number" of Windows smartphone users, Krefsky also said SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense now supports Windows Phone 8.
The expense tool also now integrates with SAP's Jam social software platform, which Krefsky described as a social network for in-company use. For example, when Travel and Expense is integrated with Jam, approving administrators and users traveling to the same event can create an online collaboration room, or "Jam group," to discuss the purpose and approvals of the trip, as well as share documents, Krefsky explained.
Integration With Hana
Cloud for Travel also is now integrated with SAP's Hana platform, an in-memory database. The integration chiefly benefits SAP customers already using such other SAP products as ERP or Employee Central, as it combines and stores all data, giving corporations more detailed insight into their travel spend, according to Krefsky. With other expense solutions, Krefsky claimed, customers would need an additional big-data analytical platform that may not be compatible across a company's other software systems.
"Our platform is consistent across the entire computing SAP world," Krefsky said. "All types of solutions are leveraging the Hana platform, so it's a consistent way across our entire computing environment to analyze data."
Automation Still A 'Gradual Shift'
While nearly 30 percent of companies still use Microsoft Excel sheets to file expenses, Krefsky said he has seen a gradual shift to automated expense systems. The industry remains "early in the lifecycle" but companies are at least aware of the benefits, he said.
"Originally we saw a lot of pushback from customers saying automated expense management and reporting is not high on the priority list," Krefsky said. "But more people—especially people in the finance office—are realizing [they can't] ignore automation of expense management, and it should be one of the higher priority items within a company's IT budget."
Another trend Krefsky has seen is corporations asking for expense systems to integrate with both their ERP systems and their online booking tools. SAP last August announced integration with online travel management provider Traxo to aggregate bookings of nonpreferred suppliers for its clients.
"Yes, we need to make trips easier for travelers," he added, "but it's really about what can this automation do to help reduce the cost of expense reporting—not just the cost of a trip—but the cost of processing an expense report in compliance with corporate policy."