Business Today has learnt that Sarawak Energy Berhad recently became the latest enterprise to embrace SAP Concur in an effort to gain more visibility into its travel and expense (T&E) spend, while also providing employees with user-friendly experiences through an integrated T&E management solution.
Sarawak Energy is the entity responsible for the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity throughout Malaysia’s largest state, Sarawak, and is wholly-owned by the State Government. The company also provides gainful employment for some 600,000 people throughout this East Malaysian state.
Concur, meanwhile, is world renowned for its completely connected spend management solution encompassing travel, expense, invoice, compliance and risk.
It was acquired by SAP in 2014 for US$8.3 billion, following SAP’s acquisition of Ariba, a business-to-business marketplace, for US$4.3 billion in 2012, and Fieldglass, which manages contract employees, earlier that year.
Together, all three companies – Concur, Ariba and Fieldglass – serve as the foundation of SAP’s “Network and Spend Management Intelligent Suite” for enterprises to automate their day-to-day processes through applications that have intelligence embedded in them.
Within Southeast Asia, Sarawak Energy follows on the heels of numerous other enterprises which have embraced SAP Concur. Its other customers include Changi Airport, Mitsui and Co, AirAsia, and Grab.
In an interview with Business Today last month, SAP Concur managing director (Southeast Asia) Madanjit Singh had said that the company remains passionately focused on providing their customers and partners with simple and powerful solutions.
“SAP Concur will continue to take businesses beyond automation to a completely connected expense, travel and invoice management solution that grows with them,” he had emphasised.
According to Madanjit, one of SAP Concur’s strengths is its commitment to sharing its expertise in terms of its implementation methodology, as well as what it calls ‘customer success’, or ongoing business support.
“Companies looking at cloud-based deployment strategies often ask how that can save them money, or how it can handle rapid deployment in the face of employee diversity across multiple countries. We have approximately 40,000 customers globally, many of whom are in Southeast Asia, and we will be able to bring all that learning to you.”
SAP Concur customers include over 70% of Fortune 100 and 500 companies, while SAP Concur services are available in all the top ten countries for business travel. Today, more than an estimated 51.8 million end users (over 9.7 million on mobile) book travel and process expenses with SAP Concur.
International research firm IDC projects businesses using Concur Invoice would achieve annual business benefits worth US$751,682 per organisation or US$15,418 for every 1,000 invoices, and are able to reap the following benefits: Achieve 505% ROI (return-of-investment) over a 5-year period, reduce invoice processing time by 68% and increase compliance by some 32%.
