Inetum integrates, in partnership with SAP, the SAP Concur solution at Symington Family Estates

Inetum integrates, in partnership with SAP, the SAP Concur solution at Symington Family Estates

The technology Inetum up with SAP to implement the SAP Concur Expense solution at Symington Family Estates, the main owner of vineyards in the Douro Valley and one of the largest Portuguese producers of premium wines.

The technology Inetum up with SAP to implement the SAP Concur Expense solution at Symington Family Estates, the main owner of vineyards in the Douro Valley and one of the largest Portuguese producers of premium wines.

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Experienced in Concur Expense implementation projects and its integration with ERP SAP S/4HANA, Inetum, IT services company and market leader in the implementation of SAP solutions, has taken another step forward in the area of business solutions for expense management.

Working closely together for more than two decades, Inetum and SAP — one of the world's leading producers of business process management software — had the opportunity to carry out their most recent Concur Expense implementation project together with the integration with SAP S/4HANA at Symington Family Estates.

The project, which started in January 2022 and had its use go-live in July, provided all Symington employees with a clear simplification of everyday expense management processes: easier registration and reimbursement, superior automation and speed, and procedures clearer and more transparent. SAP Concur solutions integrate data that help organizations manage end-to-end employee expenses. In this way, it is possible to improve the visibility of transactions and optimize compliance with policies, resulting in a more intuitive experience for the employee.

According to Manuela Caldeira, Head of IT at Symington, this partnership stemmed from the need to create simplified internal procedures: “The company had a cumbersome process for dealing with travel expenses and was looking for an agile digital tool that would reduce the time for entering the accounts into account. . The commitment to Inetum and SAP solutions was the right initiative to raise the efficiency of this internal process to another level. Through SAP Concur we managed to have a robust digital solution, promoting greater business efficiency in expense management. We are confident that this was a crucial turning point and that the administrative work – manual and subject to errors – will be optimized, thus allowing the entire process to be extremely quick”, he adds.

Capitalizing on the power of artificial intelligence, employees can now enjoy the ease of digitally capturing expenses, applied to reading receipts. This is achieved by automating most of the process and responding in accordance with Portugal's legal requirements, such as the certification of receipts for expenses with a view to SAF-T PT. Also in the backoffice — management, analysis and accounting — the whole process is now easier, putting an end to «Excel sheets».

Francisco Febrero, Group Corporate VP, CEO SAP BL & Head of Portugal at Inetum, says that “this was a challenging and extremely relevant project for all the teams involved, who embraced it with great enthusiasm”. With the paradigm shift to digital, “it is very important that companies' financial departments have tools capable of improving their operational efficiency. Knowing that Inetum can contribute to this possibility is truly rewarding and confirms, once again, the value that our company brings to our customers through the continuous improvement of its processes and services”.

SAP also comments on the satisfaction of being part of this project, emphasizing “this solution is, without a doubt, an added value for all companies, more so in a context of recovery of corporate mobility after the pandemic process we are experiencing. It is essential to make business processes increasingly easier and less bureaucratic, taking into account the environmental impact of travel and we are convinced that this will be a partnership that will extend over time, giving everyone a global vision of what is happening, from the approval of corporate travel , booking them, up to reimbursement of the respective expenses, in addition to facilitating the entire process for the employee, in terms of managing invoices/receipts and their dematerialization for the company. It is a path that started with great success and that we are proud to be an integral part of.”

The implementation of the project relied on the collaboration of elements from the SAP teams, including the SAP Concur team in the Czech Republic, from Symington Family Estates and from Inetum, having faced some challenges, since it involved the connection with non- SAP systems, namely with the CRM system, requiring accounting in CO-PA. It is in the CRM system that essential commercial and marketing data reside in the accounting of expenses, which is why it was essential to guarantee that the new installation would be carried out in a way to protect this information.

Future-proofing the business – a truly open, single platform that encompasses the ecosystem

SAP Concur's connected platform provides an excellent mobile user experience, for example establishing a direct connection with the travel agency among other providers of different services. Existing electronic receipts/invoices, across the extensive network of SAP Concur suppliers and partners, automatically populate expense reports. These supports, on paper, are easily associated using the mobile camera and the Concur application, which also has a character recognition (OCR) reader to speed up data capture and allow paper to be dematerialized, making it no longer mandatory to file physique of the same.

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