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When times have monumental change, so does organizational spending. Where your employees buy, what they buy, and how they buy is different today than it was just a few years ago. So just imagine how different it will be in the next years to come. With all these changes, every decision to spend is a critical moment for your organization. Each moment needs to be managed, and each transaction needs to be guided to keep spend flowing through the right channels, payment methods, and approvals to keep your costs under control.

But how do you ensure your organization is keeping up? IDC and SAP ÂÜÀòÊÓƵ solutions recently developed a maturity model to help you understand where your spend management program is currently at, and what steps to take next, so you can achieve your organization¡¯s outcomes and meet its ever-changing priorities.

Take our assessment to find out what stage your travel and expense program falls in the Maturity Model.

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The 5 stages of travel and expense: Compare your spend management solution to IDC¡¯s maturity model

1. Legacy Applications

Legacy systems are programs that have been used in organizations for many years. These systems are often homegrown and monolithic, utilizing spreadsheets and multiple, non-integrated systems to track financials.

At this stage, organizations risk untimely expenses, often resulting in inaccurate accruals, disconnected analytics for reporting, and the potential for non-compliant spend. Instead, finance teams are left with a lack of visibility, impacting their ability to accurately manage budgets and forecast spend, thus further hindering any efforts to be agile and flexible with changing organizational needs.

2. Automated Point Solutions

At this stage, organizations have automated segmented aspects of their financial process with single-purpose solutions. These individual solutions are quicker to get up and running, but they remain disconnected and require Finance and IT teams to learn, manage, and train employees to use multiple different systems.

Linking disparate pools of spend data limits controls and reduces accuracy of reporting. Additionally, the use of siloed systems requires staff to manually enter data points, which increases the chance for errors, and reduces overall employee experience and productivity.

3. Connected Platform Ecosystem

With a connected platform ecosystem, organizations have gone the extra mile to connect their automated point solutions in their back-office via APIs and third-party partners, enabling information to flow freely amongst the systems.

But users of these programs still need to move from one system to another, gathering disparate employee information and managing spending policies that remain difficult to enforce. With fragmented spending channels and new expense categories ¨C such as home office supplies, PPE, etc. ¨C it often becomes more complex to manage multiple systems and sources of employee spend. A lack of process and compliance guidance may open the door to wasteful spending, budget overruns, and even fraud.

4. Integrated Application Suites

Organizations at this stage have connected their applications to a specific workflow or process via cloud-enabled software. These integrated applications enable finance teams to have a more holistic view of spend and risk exposure.

However, integrated process can become stagnant without continuous feedback from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to spot the discrepancies. A lack of intelligent data reporting can prevent organizations from optimizing program performance, slow down growth, and inhibit the ability to respond to major disruptions.

5. Intelligent/Predictive Processes

The final stage of T&E maturity utilizes predictive processes with employee spend management systems to provide services that mitigate unplanned or needless expenses and forecast future spend before it happens. Organizations gain overall policy compliance and control with predictive T&E budgeting and planning, ML-based fraud detection, and near real-time data visibility to track trends and leverage valuable insights. Harnessing intelligent automation increases business agility, establishes resilience, and keeps organizations ahead of the competition.

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Continue to level up your T&E program with SAP ÂÜÀòÊÓƵ solutions

For the first moments, the big moments, the uncertain moments, the growing pains ¨C SAP ÂÜÀòÊÓƵ?solutions support your organization¡¯s changing needs. Whether it¡¯s to scale in size, adopt to new rules and regulations, or aid a dynamic workforce ¨C we enable you to confidently guide employees through change, so you can reduce the risks associated with legacy systems, disparate processes, and non-compliant spend. It¡¯s time to improve visibility into spend data, while increasing productivity and compliance. It¡¯s time to digitize to level up spend management.

To learn more, check out these resources:

• Move your organization towards greater efficiency, cost reduction, and actualize ROI by?downloading our eBook.
• Find out where your organization falls in the Travel and Expense Maturity Model by taking our assessment.