Although it’s still a young company having been formed in 2006, Chicago-based Aasonn is one of the leading cloud consultancies in the world with over 1400 customers in 30 countries. With its business spread around the globe, travel is major expense item for them and like many Aasonn were struggling with a myriad of spreadsheets that provided little visibility into financial or operating metrics and no integration between financials and their HR system of record.
Now being a cloud consultancy, Aasonn uses itself as a shining example of how companies can benefit from cloud based solutions with their rapid provisioning, easy scalability and lower total cost of ownership. So naturally when it came to improving their travel management, they chose a cloud based solution, SAP Cloud for Travel, that could be tightly integrated with other cloud solutions but still provide the flexibility needed to integrate with local third-party payroll providers in each country. Being cloud-based, provisioning these solutions is fairly rapid and Aasonn is currently on schedule to get it all rolled out within a mere 4 months.
The benefits of Travel Management in the Cloud
Already both the central finance team and the local offices are benefiting from being able to more accurately forecast their cash flow and working capital requirements. But the operations areas are benefiting too as they have a better grasp on workforce efficiency and productivity and can more accurately track the costs of the services and projects they deliver.
Now as the global economy begins to pick up, companies can expect travel expenditure to start to grow again and today with many of the airlines having pruned their capacity, the cost of travelling is way more than it was before the downturn. For many companies it is already the biggest controllable cost after payroll and benefits and the latest PayStream report, Travel and Expense Benchmarking: Improving T&E Processes through Automation from April this year shows it is still an area where non-compliance is rife and costly manual processes persist. As such, it is the proverbial ‘low hang fruit’ for many CFOs and they could use it as their express elevator into the cloud to gain benefits just like Aasonn. With their expertise, who knows, they may even be the ideal delivery partner.