Hearst, AlliedSignal Pick Concur's E-Procurement

<B> Hearst, AlliedSignal Pick Concur's E-Procurement</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty


Investing in technology to help leverage its buying power, The Hearst Corp. is the first to pioneer Concur Technologies' Employee Desktop, which integrates its CompanyStore procurement application with the Xpense Management Solution expense reporting system.

Executives at the highly decentralized communications company expect to use the procurement application for everything from office supplies to computer equipment, leaving out only its most high-volume purchases, like paper and film. It expects to begin rolling out Employee Desktop to 15,000 employees around the United States, and perhaps abroad, this summer.

AlliedSignal Inc. also just licensed CompanyStore, but will continue using its home-grown expense software. Visio, the first CompanyStore user (since before Concur acquired the product), also licensed XMS.

While pioneering a new system might scare some corporations, Hearst has used the position to gain extensive modifications to the general ledger accounting codes in Employee Desktop.

"It's fun to be involved in the launch, talking to the systems engineers, solving the architectural issues, and then deciding how to present it to users," said Bob Wilbanks, Hearst's director of corporate information systems and project leader for the e-commerce initiatives. He noted that Concur's willingness and ability to quickly modify the products helped prompt the company to select the vendor, along with the fact that Concur's sales force told Wilbanks about his colleagues' efforts to automate expense reporting as he searched for procurement software.

Hearst has been using IBM's travel expense authorization system, but sought a Web-based replacement that would allow access to all employees, regardless of their computer platform. The users work on both Windows and Macintosh, and for a diverse range of magazines, newspapers, television and cable stations, books and new media, each with different purchasing policies, said Wilbanks. Employees quickly recognized the benefits of selecting one vendor that could provide both applications.

"Procurement and travel expense management share many common business procedures, such as submission, routing and approval. So it made sense for us to seek a solution that would address both processes simultaneously," said Tom Hughes, Hearst's vice president and controller. "Concur's best-of-breed solutions offer broader functionality and point-and-click user friendliness. More importantly, the Employee Desktop shares and embodies our vision of bringing disparate business processes under one roof for the easiest deployment and management possible."

To minimize employee data entry, Hearst is integrating purchasing card data with purchase requisitions, and downloading charge card data to expense reports. Processing time for these tasks will be shortened to three days from the current 10. The application will eliminate paper-based purchase orders and the need to call or fax vendors for every purchase.

Most importantly, it will allow the company to better leverage its spend and use of preferred vendors. Hearst processes about 60,000 expense reports a year and has about $50 million in T&E costs. One of the goals of implementing this automation is to garner better data for use in negotiating.

Wilbanks estimated that the company can save between $4 million and $8 million by deploying the technology, though the return is very difficult to forecast given the decentralized environment, where "all business groups operate autonomously."

At Concur, meanwhile, president and CEO Steve Singh said Hearst "is at the forefront of automating business-critical processes to achieve dramatic time and cost savings across tens of thousands of desktops."

At AlliedSignal, purchasing manager John Dording said the company's top priority is to "create a lean and consistent purchasing process across all our business units worldwide. CompanyStore meets our needs for an end-to-end solution that not only streamlines the process, but also enables us to effectively negotiate with suppliers.