Expense Workflow Automation
The lack of workflow automation in the expense management process increased the amount of time spent processing expenses and introduced errors due to manual data entry. Here’s how Princeton Blue transformed the Employee Expense Management (EEM) process for a global pharmaceutical client by automating the submission, audit and approval of employee expenses related to travel and events.
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About the Client
The client is a global Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company and a leading supplier to the global Life Science industry with solutions and services for research, biotechnology development, pharmaceutical drug therapy development, and production. The client’s focus areas include oncology and vaccine development.
Business Challenge
The legacy expense management process required a lot of human involvement and took a lot longer than expected due to the following challenges:
- Manual work: Poor user experience resulting from a dated legacy system which required a lot of manual and time-consuming effort to create an expense request.
- Process rigidity: The workflows were hard-wired in their existing systems leading to inflexibility for the business; and any changes were costly.
- Poor Analytics: Limitation on ability to process large amount of data required involvement of support team for running large reports resulting into delayed analytics for business team.
- Lack of visibility: Employees needed to create support tickets to receive a status update for an expense report.
- Limited accessibility: The current application supported just one language, and employees speaking other languages could not use this application.
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The Solution
Princeton Blue leveraged the Appian Low-code platform to create a solution for submitting, tracking and auditing employee expenses against two categories – travel expenses and events/small meetings. The solution delivered a mobile-friendly, modern user experience to submit expenses with supporting documents and facilitated the finance team to audit the expenses and generate automated emails about the audit results.
Princeton Blue designed the solution to integrate with the client’s other internal finance applications to get expense submissions and payment status information. Using Appian’s built-in multi-language support, the solution now supported multiple languages.
Benefits
After having adopted the expense workflow automation solution, the client reported the following benefits in the expense management process
Improved Cycle Time
Configurable Workflows
Improved Accuracy
Access to Information
Seamless automation
Automated expense submission and batch generation in a single click instead of multiple manual steps.
Improved efficiency
Expense data from multiple legacy applications is integrated in real-time as needed.
Complete transparency
Employees could view expense submission status and get notified of progress via emails.
Reduced manual effort
Real-time integration with legacy expense systems automated several manual activities including VAT computations and validations.
Better user experience
Multi-lingual, modern, and mobile user experience removed language barriers enabling easy global access to the solution.
Access to Information
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Learn more about our Life Sciences Automation experience.
Benefits
- Reduced the new label approval cycle to under 6 months.
- Headquarters could initiate label update submissions in real time, with country participants retroactively completing steps within a highly visible and tracked system to synchronize with real-world deadlines.
- Inbuilt form validation in the system helped to reduce form-fill errors, improving accuracy, and reducing delays.