Concur Travel and Expense: Getting the Most from Your Concur Implementation

Hi Olivier,

to begin with: not sure which scope you are referring to with „travel expenses“? Do you mean „travel and expense“ or just „expense“ and limiting that to expenses caused by travel (why would you do that?).

Let me assume you are talking about Expenses. A typical implementation (say, 50,000 transactions per year) can be done in 3 months for one country or one main country and a few smaller ones, although you could squeeze it considerably, if you are ready with your own internal processes. Most of the work you need to do as a customer is not system related, but if you really want to make good use of the advantages of the solution, there is a lot of ground to cover, because your old solution most likely had far fewer options.
(I managed a medium sized implementation with 9 countries for Travel and Expense plus a few side-projects in 12 weeks in the past, because circumstances required it, but I’d allow for more time, if possible).

You don’t need a system integrator, except maybe for the non-Concur side of interfaces. In that case, try to avoid the Big5 (or Big25) as they will make you pay through your nose, when a pragmatic solution would do. Most of them do either not understand the cloud model or try to use old methodologies to get their large resource pool busy.

The technical implementation is usually completely done by Concur themselves.

Where many customers do need help is their part in the cloud project. As I said in the article, many customers can’t get requirement definition, policy changes process changes, training, behavioural changes, partner integration, testing done by themselves at the speed a typical Concur project goes. It does help to have a partner to look after these parts, but it depends a lot in your internal capabilities and resource situation.
For example we currently plan a 3-months-2-country Concur expense implementation with intense coaching on Project Management, Change Management, Process Design, System Requirements and Testing with 40 days of work. It is important to understand that, whilst it does help, if your partner knows Concur, most of these activities are not that close to the system. With enough internal resources, 12 days milestone coaching might just be all you need. None of these approaches is imo likely to work with a typical systems integrator. I say this so bluntly, because from your name and email I understand you are based in France and as we don’t have French speaking consultants, it can’t be interpreted as pitching our own services to you :-)