A Case Study on Implementation of TravelGrid

Travel is the third largest expense on a company budget after material and payroll. Managing Travel and Expenses have always been a daunting task for a medium and large scale corporates, especially when the entire system is driven by a manual process. Laborious methodologies are practiced to enforce tight control on travel spends, maintaining piles of documents pertaining to bills, invoices and tickets, streamlining approval process, avoiding fraudulent transactions etc. Moreover, a smooth processing of Travel Request and expense settlement solely depends on how well the multiple departments work in tandem such as Travel Approvers, Travel Desk, Finance and Travel Agents.

A subtle retarded performance by one of the respective departments will result in the surge of travel spends. A delay of five days in a travel approval can push up airfare costs by 10% according to the study. A delay in the settlement of expenses incurred by an employee leads to indefinite escalations making the top notch associates intervene and clear the mess, hence, lot of efforts in terms of time and money will be spent causing the raise of secondary expenditures.

How to prevent these anomalies? Automation comes to rescue. With the advent of cutting edge technologies, lot of analytical tools have emerged in the market which have business intelligence feature out of the box. Typically, these tools help the stakeholders to be prudent and take wise decision with regard to cost cutting measures. By harnessing the power of business intelligent reports, a company can drastically reduce its man power and increase the efficiency in terms of business output and performance.

In a nutshell, the data pertaining to analytical reports are apparently fed from the integrated tools which automate the entire process end to end. One such tool, which can end to end automate the entire travel and expense process is TravelGrid.

Channel Mentor IT Solutions Private Limited (hereinafter referred to as “CM”) offered its flagship product TravelGrid to PVPL to automate its entire travel process. CM has also customized the product to meet PVPL’s niche requirement especially to automate the Taxi request workflow.

TravelGrid can run as a standalone system and as an integrated system well. Typically, most of the corporate will have an ERP, which manages the entire operations of an organization.CM has recommended PVPL to use TravelGrid as an integrated platform. With this setup, PVPL can completely leverage the benefits of end to end automation.

TravelGrid solution running at PVPL has integrated with three systems as stated below:

• Integration with LDAP: LDAP is an acronym for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which allows users to authenticate using Windows user account. When integrated with LDAP, PVPL users need not have separate credentials to login into TravelGrid, instead, users can use their Windows username and password to authenticate the TravelGrid user account. Hence, user need not maintain multiple user credentials dedicated for TravelGrid portal, which is usually difficult to remember.
• Integration with SAP’s HCM Module: Typically, most of the ERPs will have its own Human Capital Management module, which will have various components such as Organizational Management, Personal Administration, E-Recruitment, Time Management, Payroll, Employee Self Service and Management Self Service.
  Employee Self Service (ESS) component will have vital information pertaining to the employees such as their Name, Employee Code, Grade, Cost Center, Managers & Approval Hierarchy, Work Location, Designation etc. TravelGrid uses this information to drive the workflow within the application. Every successful login to TravelGrid application, the system will retrieve the employee information from ESS component and stores it in the TravelGrid database. This information will later be used to quickly drive the workflow. ESS information is also used to perform a check on travel policy violation, which is apparently based on Grade and Type of travel (Domestic or International) in any organization. Hence, this cuts down lot of manual checks typically performed by finance personnel.
• Integration with SAP’s FICO Module: SAP’s FICO module is mainly used for managing finance related data such Travel Expenses, General Expenses, Invoices and Credit Notes, Cash and Forex Advances etc.
  In the current phase, TravelGrid has been integrated with SAP’s FICO module to automatically push the Travel Expense data to the SAP system. When an expense is submitted by an employee, the expense summary goes to the respective Managers for approval. Post approval, the expense summary will go to Bill Verifier’s queue in the TravelGrid application. Here he / she can verify the expenses, approve or reject the expense. When approved, the system will automatically post all the expense line items to the SAP FICO module. Hence, this integration eliminates the manual work of submitting the expense document line items one by one in the SAP portal and reduces the risk of human errors while making the entry in the SAP portal.
  In the future phase, TravelGrid may also post invoices pertaining to Air / Rail / Bus and Taxi travel to the SAP system.
  Currently, the integration with SAP system is done through Web services, which is developed by PVPL team. This Web service ensures the security by avoiding direct integration with SAP system. Hence, the Web service acts like a middle layer or an interface between TravelGrid and SAP system.
• Customized Reports: CM has delivered customized reports as requested by PVPL. Today, these reports easily cut down manual work so that Travel Desk and Finance team need not perform a laborious job of converting Travel and Expense related data from emails to a spreadsheet format.