DuPont, Ford Automate Global T&E

<B> DuPont, Ford Automate Global T&E</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty

In a telling sign of the maturation of the automated expense reporting market, DuPont and Ford Motor Co. last week separately awarded contracts for global intranet-based solutions to be deployed early next year.

Ford, headquartered in Dearborn, Mich., selected Captura Software of Bothell, Wash., to provide its Employee Payables expense software to an estimated 61,000 employees in 80 countries around the globe over the next 24 months. Deployment is expected to begin in North America early next year, according to Jim Cain, a Ford spokesman.

DuPont, based in Wilmington, Del., contracted with Concur Technologies (formerly Portable Software) to provide its Xpense Management Solution to 50,000 employees in more than 70 countries.

For Concur, DuPont is one of six multinational corporate customers that have licensed its XMS offering this quarter, noted Natalie Hadfield, spokesperson for the Redmond, Wash.-based software firm. Captura also has other multinational clients, led by Merrill Lynch, the first company deploying the new intranet version of Employee Payables, said president and CEO Dana Bruttig.

These latest customer decisions "speak well to the market" for intranet-based systems, Bruttig said. "There is no way we can manage such large deployments with the classic client-server software. Intranet clients open the door to do multinationals."

"We've received numerous RFPs for global expense solutions in the past six months," Bruttig said. "As we get closer to Y2K, big companies with mainframe legacy systems are realizing that they must find a replacement. Other companies are realizing it's an area of cost reduction. We're in a half dozen deals now that are all global."

Just a year ago, a small number of companies had implemented automated expense reporting systems or AERSs, while a huge number had it on their "to do" dockets, said Tom Wilkinson, president of the Travel Management Group, Alexandria, Va. "It's been propelled by the radically fast deployment of the intranet. We are surprised when we see a company that doesn't have an intranet."

Also spurring global deployment of AERSs, Wilkinson said, is the fact that many multinationals have deployed enterprise resource planning systems, at least on the financial side. To do that, they've had to think about global data solutions, warehouses and standards. Automated expense reporting is another application that fits nicely in improved communications and data collection, he said.

Ford is certainly an example of a company that has rapidly embraced the intranet. "We've identified the Web as a key communications tool within the company," said Ford's Cain. "We have home pages for all key areas, bulletin boards and very Web-savvy employees."

However, Ford has been processing its one million expense reports a year by a variety of manual means--including "everything from carbon paper forms to Excel spreadsheets," and even a home-grown system called Travel Expense Reporting, Cain said. Looking at ways to globalize this product, a Ford team developed tax, language and legal specifications, Bruttig said. But after analyzing the cost of developing the software internally, Ford executives decided "they might as well partner with an existing vendor. They will bring intellectual property and we will bring real product."

In this unique "partnership," Ford will help Captura write the rules engines to deploy its product in 80 countries, and provide translation into nine different languages. In addition, Captura will work with Ford's corporate card provider, Citibank Visa, to provide automatic downloads of charge data, along with data transfers from charge card applications to make it easier to sign up employees as users in the system.

Captura also is a solutions provider in Citibank's e-Citi commerce solutions, a suite of electronic products and services designed to help customers in the evolving global economy.

"Using a corporate credit card from Citibank and automated T&E reporting from Captura, we have seen clients cut processing costs from almost $40 per expense report to under $2," Bruttig said. "In addition, a lengthy processing turnaround period can be cut down to days."

DuPont, meanwhile, was seeking a means to streamline its expense processing globally.

"Although we had already automated the expense reporting process for our U.S.- based organization, we needed to have better access to travel spending information for use in managing expenses, particularly in a global manner," said Charles Stahl, DuPont's global project manager and manager of reimbursements. "We also wanted a system that would provide more reporting capabilities to our travelers and be easier to use, with a more intuitive user interface."

For DuPont, the payback for automating its expense processing will come from: alleviating the expense reporting burden for employees; providing data to ensure the company receives its negotiated rates from vendors; and allowing the company to automate and streamline the process of managing travel receipts.

"What we expect to save in the cost of handling receipts alone will more than pay for the cost of the software," Stahl said.

The common user interfaces found in most AERSs today allow virtually "anyone in the organization to use them without any training, and the company to realize a return on investment," said Judy Hodges, a research manager of applications for International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass., which is conducting a study of AERSs.

Although both software companies already have European sales offices, the new contracts are spurring them to open additional support centers outside the United States. Captura plans to open centers in Europe and Malaysia. "Ford will bring us into the PacAsia market," Bruttig said. "Particularly in Japan, where only 5 percent of T&E expenses are actually on a credit card, it makes no sense for us to go sell this product. But it does make sense to service our multinationals there."

Concur has just hired a new general manager for the Asia/Pacific region and aligned with a New Zealand firm to provide all implementation and support in that region, Hadfield said.