SAP Company Concur to Implement Travel & Expense Solution for Air Asia

20th May 2016

AirAsia Group subsidiary, AirAsia Global Shared Services, needed a simple solution to make travel expensing simpler. That solution came courtesy of a new deal made with the SAP company Concur Solution, which will implement an integrated Travel & Expense solution for it.

“We Needed Something That Would Provide a Quick, One-Stop Solution for Travel Expense Claims”

Naresh Alagan, AirAsia Global Shared Services chief executive officer said about the new partnership:

Even under normal circumstances, travel claims and coordination are complex. Magnify that by a thousand-fold and we realized that we were under real pressure to look towards an integrated, simplified solution to replace the current manual in-house duty travel approval system which has separate flight and hotel bookings.

Mr Alagan continued:

We needed something that would provide a quick one-stop solution as the travel expense claims were being managed across six locations in nine subsidiaries independently. Concur’s solution was offered and we were impressed by its ability to tightly integrate our systems.

 The implementation will, the airline expects, reduce travel and expense management impact for all of AirAsia Group employees and will also cut down time required to raise and claim travel expenses as well as reduce the current usage of paper.

The solution will also allow up to 10 people across the AirAsia Group to be reassigned to more value-adding duties and will allow user to raise up to 100 per cent of travel claims, travel approvals and hotel bookings. It will also include a centralized travel desk, capable of making flight bookings, handling exceptional cases and settling payroll expense claims as well as hotel payments.

AirAsia Global Shared Services CEO Alagan also said:

We wanted to help AirAsia employees spend as little time as possible on less value-added activities such as managing duty travel and more on growing the business. The shift to digitized claims is a step toward a paperless environment as we continue to utilize more cloud solutions. Concur’s Travel and Expense solution key enabling benefit will be to streamline and abbreviate AirAsia’s travel expense process.

The implementation is expected to be fully completed by early July, 2016.