Nestlé: Digitalizing expense management from claim submission to approval and reimbursement in a new age of business travel
Automation delivers travel-expense visibility
Nestlé transformed its travel and expense management processes by implementing SAP Concur solutions. The automation of these processes has significantly reduced manual tasks, allowing employees to submit expense claims easily and speeding up reimbursement times. With a successful global rollout, automated travel expense management is giving the business a new era of control.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Vevey, Switzerland | 270,000 employees |
of expense reimbursements can now be approved electronically.
increase in employee efficiency to create an expense report.
of manual expense management processes eliminated.
Global IT Financial Accounting Senior Product Manager for Travel Management and Accounts Payable, Nestlé Information Technology
Simplifying and integrating travel and expense processes
As a leading food and beverage company, Nestlé S.A. boasts a global presence, diverse brands, and innovative products that cater to consumer needs. The company manages over 2,000 brands, from global icons to local favorites, sold in 188 markets around the world. Over 30 of its trusted brands, including Purina, Nespresso, Maggi, Milo, and Nido, generate more than CHF 1 billion (US$1.1 billion) each in annual sales at the retail level.
With worldwide operations, business travel is essential for Nestlé employees. Therefore, the need for an innovative and faster travel management solution became critical for the company to transition away from a manual and paper-based process that involved a complicated cost management and reimbursement procedure.
Automating expense reports and reimbursement processes
Nestlé wished to simplify its travel and expense management operations while boosting efficiency, productivity, scalability, cost control, and visibility to make better decisions. To this end, it selected the Concur Travel & Expense solution to automate spend management and eliminate paper processes.
Maria Magdalena Riera, global IT financial accounting senior product manager for travel management and accounts payable at Nestlé, comments on the decision: “When the company evaluated market-leading solutions, nothing came close to Concur Travel & Expense in offering the level of scalability and stability we needed across 188 countries. Using it in tandem with the functionality offered by the ExpenseIt solution means that our employees can use their phone to capture receipts and automatically categorize expense claims.”
Native integration with the SAP ERP application was another major advantage of the solution. With Nestlé’s core systems running on SAP ERP, it was a priority for the expense management solution to interconnect with the ERP application. Riera elaborates, “As well as providing a harmonious connection with SAP ERP, it was also important for the solution to integrate with other third-party solutions. With SAP Concur solutions, there’s a simplified way of connecting to apps from partners on the SAP Concur App Center site. We use one to audit expense reports using artificial intelligence with more than 20 audit models that we’ve activated.”
Nestlé has also integrated SAP Concur solutions with its travel agency’s business systems, enabling the booking tool to facilitate travel arrangements tailored to individual employee profiles.
Integrating the Concur Expense solution with VAT Connect Expense from Taxback International allows the company to recover value added tax (VAT) on relevant receipts while simplifying the traveler user experience. Since VAT rates differ from country to country, VAT recovery could be complex. This integration simplifies the process, freeing employees from this task.
The implementation of SAP Concur started in geographies with the most expense reports: Oceania, Switzerland, a majority of countries in Latin America, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, the United States, and Canada. The company then worked with an implementation partner to complete the rollout to 58 more countries in Nestlé’s network.
Global IT Financial Accounting Senior Product Manager for Travel Management and Accounts Payable, Nestlé Information Technology
Gaining better control and insights on travel spending
By digitalizing its travel and expense management processes through the implementation of SAP Concur solutions globally, Nestlé now provides greater support for travelers while gaining more spend visibility and eliminating a resource-intensive reimbursement process.
To aid user adoption, Nestlé made use of the Concur User Assistant solution by WalkMe, giving its people intuitive training content within the user interface of SAP Concur.
With increased process efficiency from automating how employees submit expense claims, there’s no longer any need for circulating paper expense claim forms, except in those countries where paper-based claims are required for legal reasons. Without paper forms, employees can submit claims on the go, freed from onerous expense claim tasks. At the same time, streamlining the process for line managers means that they can now review and approve expense reports without having to sift through e-mail trails and offline approvals. Riera comments, “Through SAP Concur, we’ve seen big productivity gains. Now everyone in our organization can create an expense report themselves without need of assistance. On average, the time needed for employees to create an expense report has shrunk from 30 minutes to 10 minutes.”
Another area where Nestlé has seen significant improvements is through the configuration of automatic controls around corporate policy compliance and budgets, compelling employees to book hotels that meet budget requirements. These controls have generated significant savings.
Global IT Financial Accounting Senior Product Manager for Travel Management and Accounts Payable, Nestlé Information Technology
Supporting innovation with AI capabilities
Through quarterly releases of new functionality from SAP Concur, Nestlé can keep pace with technology advancements and take advantage of developments using generative AI and the Joule capability in the future to enhance the user experience and accelerate adoption.