OMRON Reduced Expense Claim Rejections in SAP Concur With In-App Tutorials

The OMRON Story

OMRON Transformed & Consolidated Its Expense Management Processes With SAP Concur

OMRON is a leading automation company with its core competencies in ‘Sensing Control + Think’ technology, and is engaged in a wide range of businesses, including industrial automation, healthcare, social systems, and device & and module solutions. It has about 28,000 employees worldwide, working to provide products and services in more than 130 countries, contributing to the creation of a better society.

In 2020, OMRON created a global shared services center in the Philippines to provide financial and accounting services to various business departments and OMRON subsidiaries. It currently supports all employees across the Asia-Pacific and North American regions.

A key to its accounting and financial transformation project was migrating from manual processes to automated, streamlined, and simplified claims and expense management processes powered by SAP Concur.

To drive ROI from its new SAP Concur implementation, OMRON needed to provide end-user training on how to use the new application and its custom workflows. Additionally, OMRON had to offer contextual SAP Concur end-user training and support for different employee roles, use cases, and regions.

The Solution

Driving SAP Concur Adoption With Contextual User Support in the Flow of Work

OMRON’s L&D department was already using Whatfix to provide in-app guidance and support for its employees on other mission-critical internal applications. They highly recommended using Whatfix for the financial shared services department to support its new SAP Concur rollout.

“With Whatfix, we created in-app guidance on Concur to walk our employees through processes. Additionally, we could export the guidance into PDFs and help documentation to create a library of Concur process support that end-users could rely on,” said Patrick Ruiz, Finance Manager of Global Shared Services at OMRON.

Ruiz said that one major issue OMRON faced early in its SAP Concur rollout was a high rate of rejected expense reports due to end-users incorrectly using its processes, specifically failing to attach supporting documents like receipts or invoices. With Whatfix, OMRON could identify where the issue occurred in the expense submission process.

“With Whatfix, we can monitor why expense case rejections occur and share these reports with stakeholders in different counties to improve the application’s use and optimize our processes to reduce case rejections,” said Ruiz.

It also used Whatfix to create an in-app Self-Help center featuring guided experiences that overlayed SAP Concur’s expense report submission workflows. This provided employees with moment-of-need support when filling out and submitting expense reports. When opening the Self Help center for the first time, employees were presented with a quick guided Tour that provided an overview of what it is and how Concur users can use it.

The Results

Maximizing SAP Concur ROI With Frictionless, Guided Expense Workflows

With Whatfix, OMRON achieved its expense management-related business outcomes through its transformation project. It was able to:

• Accelerate its SAP Concur transformation project, streamlining expense management tasks and transforming manual processes into digital workflows.
• Consolidate expense reporting and credit card payments for different business units.
• Reimburse employees faster by reducing rejected expense claims.
• Reduce duplicate and rejected Concur expense claims by 7% with in-app Smart Tips embedded into Concur’s workflows. This improved cash flow management and reduced the workload on the financial shared services team.
• Enable employees with an engaging expense management workflow that provided timely in-app assistance with guided Flows, contextual Smart Tips, and Self Help for basic Concur support and process-related queries.

“Whatfix simplifies everything. Our team addresses SAP Concur questions from employees in many different countries. Whatfix acts as an extra pair of hands, providing a starting point that enables employees to overcome Concur-related issues independently and allowing our team to focus on more complex issues. Having in-app guidance and pop-up experiences, and repurposing them into a library of help documentation has further enabled our employees,” said Ruiz.

After the initial Concur rollout settled down, Ruiz and his team surveyed end-users across the company to understand how the implementation went and how they could improve Concur support and future financial-related software rollouts. Employees across the organization frequently mentioned Whatfix as the key reason they were able to adapt to Concur and adopt its new digital expense management workflows.

“Six months post-implementation, we surveyed Concur end-users to understand employee sentiment on the transformation project. The feedback was quite positive, with employees being thankful for having Whatfix support the rollout, as it made life easier for them from an end-user perspective,” said Ruiz.

Looking forward, Ruiz is excited to expand account and financial shared services support across the European region and standardize the expense management process support for new employees using Whatfix’s auto-translation features.