SAP Concur has partnered with meetings management company Groupize to offer what the companies call an end-to-end self-service meetings management solution for professional planners as well as occasional meeting organizers, the company announced Tuesday. Dubbed Concur Event Management by Groupize, the product now is available in the United States as a "solution extension," sold to clients by Concur but powered and supported by Groupize.
"We know as people start traveling again and as travel programs start unlocking, lots of companies are [asking], 'What is my program going to look like going forward? What kind of controls, compliance, spend management, duty of care can I layer into my program now that we are restarting this process?' " said SAP Concur VP of global travel strategy Brian Hace. "We think this is a great offering that goes in line with some of the other things we are doing on the duty-of-care side and even on the spend side. This is a core part of our product strategy, which is extending that end-to-end value proposition by making our products extensible to partners and allowing partners to invest in really cool feature functionality value to the client."
Concur and Groupize first partnered about eight years ago, and Groupize has offered applications in Concur's app center, said Groupize chief customer officer Charles de Gaspe Beaubien. Hace added that the companies over the past year or so started working more closely to make Groupize a solution extension and assess the opportunity of the offering for Concur's clients.
"It's very exciting for us," de Gaspe Beaubien said. "One of the highest trends right now, especially since Covid, is that companies are looking for technology to transform their business. With Covid, a lot of people got caught not having visibility, and then it really identified a gap in their meetings program. There's even more of a need to bring in technology to control what is now the largest area of unmanaged spend in a company."
He added that the convergence of travel and meetings at some companies into a single department also has smoothed the path for this offering. "If you're using a certain technology to manage your travel, it's a natural extension to use that same technology to manage your travel and meetings," said de Gaspe Beaubien. "That's another big tailwind we've been talking about for years in the industry that is happening, and Covid accelerated that."
Concur Event Management by Groupize product features include compliance controls and duty-of-care and spend governance with reporting and analytics dashboards that allow customers to track and review cross-event spend, logistics, reports and attendee metrics. It also can capture event spend, resulting in more accurate budgeting and better supplier negotiations, according to SAP Concur.
Groupize started out focused on small, simple meetings. Just as the pandemic was hitting U.S. shores, the company expanded its capabilities to provide an all-in-one meetings solution for events of any size and type. It soon added alternative venues, risk assessments and virtual capabilities and a car rental module.