From workforce to driving force: How AI and automated spend management fuel business success

Your workforce is exactly as the name suggests—a force. People are the lifeblood of your organisation, and by equipping them with an artificial intelligence (AI)- driven spend management solution, you can get the most from them and transform them into a driving force.

The key is to give them what they need to work faster and smarter, which in turn leads to increased efficiency and cost savings. So, what does your workforce need in order to be a driving force in your business?

Employee empowerment should be top of any business agenda to ensure they feel valued, valuable, supported, trusted and respected. When they feel all these things, you’ll get much more value out of them, which provides a direct route to a more resilient, secure and prosperous future for your business.

And, future-proofing business is front of mind for finance teams, with 90% of senior finance leaders saying their key task is to prepare for the unexpected and nearly 62% of CFOs seeing AI as an essential tool in managing that.

In this blog, we’ll explore how, by future-proofing your spending processes, you can drive workforce transformation.

How do you improve employee engagement?

To improve engagement, businesses need to be championing employees and injecting the business with the

right tools and resources to help them be as productive and purposeful as possible. 

“Use it or lose it” might be an overused cliché but in this case, getting more from your workforce might not only bring you cost savings, it might also reduce churn.

According to Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, the UK rate of engagement at work (10%) remains one of the lowest in Europe, ranking near the bottom among peer countries (33 out of 38), with countries like the US reporting triple the number of engaged employees (31%).

Disengagement is a real threat to your business and this isn’t the time to take your foot off the pedal when it comes to employee experience. You now have the perfect opportunity to ensure your talent is engaged and productive. 

How can your workforce drive success?

The essence of a business-driving workforce is freedom. When you show you value your employees more by providing engaging experiences, less stress, more transparency, and greater autonomy, they will in turn bring more value to your business.

An automated spend management platform gives employees the time and freedom to dedicate to cost savings strategies that positively impact the business whilst realising financial processing time reductions.

By offering mobile tools, your workforce can become flexible, autonomous and compliant, always, and tasks that took days manually can be completed in an instant, relieving stress and restoring work-life balance.

You can achieve all of this with a platform that integrates business travel, expenses and invoice together. One that’s packed with AI, best practices and continuous innovation.

For an at-a-glance insight into what MORE you can get from your workforce with automated spend management, check out our Drive Your Business Forward with an Empowered Workforce Infographic.

Let’s now look at five routes to transform your workforce into a driving force in business.

Five routes to transform your workforce into a driving force

Route 1: Streamlined processes 

Think of this as the short cut. Time-consuming manual tasks are even more frustrating when businesses are under pressure to do more with less. It’s no surprise that 59% of organisations said employee frustration with expense processes was causing large or very large negative business impacts.

This route enables employees to dedicate more time to strategic, high-value tasks by enabling financial processing time reductions.

How SAP Concur can help you transform your workforce into a driving force 

Integrate Concur Travel with your Concur Expense solution, and you’ll create a simple, mobile booking process for your team that automatically syncs with their expense reports, so there is minimal effort in getting travel expenses submitted and reimbursed.

Add Concur Invoice to automate capturing, coding and approving invoices, so APs and budget owners won’t find their time and energy eaten up by manual tasks. They’ll be energised and ready for whatever tasks can drive your business forward.

The destination: Efficient, eco-friendly approval workflows with paperless applications. Your business benefits from optimised operational focus, efficiency and productivity.

Route 2: Cost effective strategies  

This route ensures a safe, on-time arrival. When market conditions and costs are volatile you must get every bit of value from every bit of your budget. By implementing systems that ensure on-time reimbursements and cost-effective measures, you can achieve a reduction in financial processing time and increase savings.

How SAP Concur can help you transform your workforce into a driving force 

When you automate travel, together with business expenses and invoice, on the SAP Concur platform, you increase control and confidence over three big sources of spending. 

You can rid your workflows of paper receipts and frustrating steps to give employees a refreshingly simple experience, an experience that does most of the work for them and ensures they are never out of pocket. 

The destination: Your business can automatically monitor and control spending patterns, provide cost-saving opportunities, and protect cash flow and employee experience.  

Route 3: Improved workforce autonomy

Sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the open road. By providing employees with mobile-based tools which automatically promote expense policy enforcement and wise travel choices, you increase your workforce’s autonomy, flexibility and ability to make in-policy, sustainable decisions in business travel while on the move.  

Nearly half (48%) of business travellers expect their employer to let them book outside of company policy in order to feel safe in certain areas of the world and 89% of business travellers will take extra steps to reduce the environmental impact of their business travel over the next 12 months. 

Sustainability is good for business, with 80% of organisations saying sustainability initiatives help their organisation optimise and reduce costs. With more than 9 in 10 travellers willing to decline an assigned trip that conflicts with their health and safety concerns, offering them the opportunity to remain within policy and stay safe is the best route for your business.

How SAP Concur can help you transform your workforce into a driving force 

With Concur Travel you give employees the option to book directly with suppliers, obtain your preferred rates and have all the data flow into their expense reports and business travel apps.

To keep them safe and supported on the road, you can help travellers find emergency help, neighbourhood safety scores and duty of care services via the SAP Concur App partners.

The destination: Employees can easily capture and submit within-policy expenses on the go, make smart business travel choices and stay safely connected wherever they go.

To find out what is top of mind for businesses right now, read our read our  SAP Trends and Predictions eBook.

Route 4: Actionable insights

Sometimes you need to rely on the Sat Nav to give you a perfectly mapped out journey. Whether your teams are tracking progress against your annual plan or tweaking budgets based on new priorities for the quarter, spending transparency is critical to their effectiveness. In fact, 55% of CFOs are investing in data analytics and reporting tools to tackle forecasting challenges.

But seeing all your spending is only the beginning of the journey. Understanding what’s happening, where you can do better and what impact adjustments will make is where the road really opens up.

How SAP Concur can help you transform your workforce into a driving force 

With accurate spending data already captured in your Concur Expense solution, you can add reporting tools such as Intelligence and Budget, utilising prebuilt, ready-to-go dashboards. 

AI-driven spend management provides predictive analytics and actionable insights into data that flows in from all corners of the business, which gives both employees and management real-time visibility into travel and expense data. This will help you clearly see where your policies are working, where you’re spending and where you can save money.

The destination: Improved financial analysis and enhanced employee empowerment, transparency and spend control.

For more direction on how AI is revolutionising the way finance leaders tackle today’s challenges, read our Why Finance is Ready for a Breakout Transformation with Artificial Intelligence eBook.   

Route 5: Automated expense policies 

Finally, we have the safe route. Because auditing expense reports in-house can be time-consuming and labour-intensive, you might not conduct audits as often or as rigorously as you should.

Giving your workforce automated systems that enforce expense policies and tax rules in real time means they don’t have to lift a finger to adhere to spending policies, and waste time and effort or stress over compliance issues.

How SAP Concur can help you transform your workforce into a driving force 

By adding Intelligent Audit, a solution that uses both human auditors and AI to identify potential misuse and fraud prevention in expenses more quickly and intelligently, your teams can actively manage expenses and compliance as spending happens by applying intelligent and flexible controls throughout the entire process.  

This reduces the manual effort spent generating accounting entries and conducting financial consolidation and reporting.

AI reviews every expense, checks it against your policies, then flags what needs your attention and you won’t have to worry about sustainability requirements, tax rules, fraud or if your budgets are well spent.

The destination: Streamlined processes that aim to reduce overtime and manual audits, leading to a specified increase in employee empowerment and better compliance.

Drive into the future with SAP Concur 

This is the perfect time to transform your workforce into a future-ready driving force. AI and intelligent spend management provides the fuel to accelerate this process.

SAP Concur solutions will help you embark on every stage of your journey, with solutions to help get more from your workforce, including managing travel booking, expense reporting and approvals, spend control, tax and regulatory rule compliance, visibility and reporting. 

Harness the power of workforce today and you’ll inject your business with the fuel it needs to keep strong and stable, tomorrow.

Sit back and let us help you drive your business forward.

Discover what MORE you can get from your workforce with automated spend management in our easy-to-read Drive Your Business Forward with an Empowered Workforce Infographic.

Explore what businesses are demanding this year, by reading our SAP Concur Trends and Predictions eBook.

To get the lowdown on AI and its role in future-proofing business, read our Why Finance is Ready for a Breakout Transformation with Artificial Intelligence