5.3    Travel and Expense Management: Concur

Concur is a solution that combines and integrates the overall spend into three major blocks: Concur Travel, Concur Expense, and Concur Invoice. The central principle is that all connected information can be managed in one place and provide transparency on the overall spend. Concur integrates with numerous third-party solutions and apps, from Airbnb and United Airlines to Uber and Starbucks.

5.3.1    Spend Management

All information used to plan a trip and to organize your travel is captured within Concur Travel, even if it’s offline by a travel agent working with Concur. All of this information is exchanged with Concur Expense and flows into an employee report, which makes it much easier for employees to create their expense report.

The portfolio consists of five main products:

• Concur Expense
  Provides full visibility into spend and the ability to ensure policy and regulatory compliance. It provides you with the capability to synchronize your credit card as a baseline for the generation of your claims. It also provides a nice and easy user experience (UX) to guide you through your expense claiming process.
• Concur Travel
  Uses the same easy UX and simplifies the way you do your online travel reservation and booking. As already stated, this booking tool is tightly integrated with Concur Expense and feeds information as a baseline for your expense report.
• Concur Invoice
  Accelerates and simplifies the invoicing of expenses and reduces your invoice costs significantly. It helps you automate your invoices and get transparency on your overall travel and expense spending.
• Concur for Mobile
  Complements the web-based solution, so it’s possible to manage the expenses as well as to do travel or invoice approvals.
• Concur Data Insights
  Delivers the data and tools you need to control spending. Interactive dashboards, reports, and alerts provide a real-time view into what is being spent and who is spending it.

Integration of Concur Expense and Concur Invoice into SAP’s HR and financial solutions is planned as part of the overall digital core strategy. Especially for HR, a legal reporting standard integration is planned for the near future. For Concur Travel, further integration into mobile with, for example, location-based bookings is planned. As part of the Concur Data Insights, a spend management dashboard with actionable analytics is planned.

Concur has two focus areas planned to enhance and integrate into the existing SAP portfolio:

• Consistent preconfigured country regulatory templates across SAP and Concur
  The goal is to deliver simplified regulatory templates out of the box for existing countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, and with new countries.
• Standard seamless, automated integration with SAP backend
  This integration is currently available via the Boomi connector for SAP, flat file, web service, custom connector, or customer bridge program. Further enhancements, especially in the area of employee/HR, include cost object data for HR and finance master data, and the support of finance interface postings.

5.3.2    Concur and SAP S/4HANA

Similar to the two previous products discussed, Concur is aimed at completing the business network and extending the SAP portfolio toward travel and expense management. From an implementation perspective, there are no limitations regarding SAP S/4HANA. The integration path is equal for customers running SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM) and SAP ERP Financials (FI) on separate instances and on a single instance, or for customers running SAP S/4HANA Finance, or any combination of such. From an integration perspective, SAP shared that standard integration packages will be available in the following releases that support integration scenarios via SAP HANA Cloud Platform or SAP Process Orchestration (SAP PO) that support FI and payroll postings.

From a financial perspective, Concur is available as a separate license and isn’t being considered in the SAP S/4HANA license model.