Consultative Intelligence: Helping Your Data Do the Talking

When it comes to huge amounts of business spend data, sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees. What you need is someone to come in and whack through the foliage, find a path and uncover the stuff that really matters. The stuff that will help you make strategic decisions and uncover hidden spend. This is exactly what happens when you add SAP Concur Consultative Intelligence to your toolkit.

For many organisations, data has just become too large and disparate to gain any insight from, unless it’s funnelled into a holistic end-to-end solution like SAP Concur. In this scenario, TMCs, online booking tools, offline travel data, credit card data, procurement cards, expense submissions and ERP data are all accounted for in one place. Add to that SAP Concur Intelligence, which gives you scheduled dashboards and reports delivered straight to your inbox — job done!

Your Unique Data

Not quite. You’ll definitely have great information with those things in place, but every business is different. Your internal teams have a wealth of knowledge about the data they look after but if this could be married to a fresh pair of eyes from outside of the business, it could generate new, unexpected insights. What business wouldn’t benefit from customised reports that are focused on specific areas particularly travel, expense and accounts payable data? The real value, and the real business impact, of data intelligence come from being able to drill down into cost centres and make even faster, better decisions based around your unique business goals.

An Extra Pair of Eyes

Which is where SAP Concur Consultative Intelligence comes in. Like Concur Intelligence, it gives you more than 200 standard high-level reports and rules-based dashboards, but most importantly you also get access to a designated reporting consultant who will help you build additional, uniquely tailored reports and dashboards to uncover potential areas of savings. These experts work alongside your internal team, every step of the way, to extract the kind of insights that will have the biggest impact on your business, your teams, even your individuals. Experts support multiple languages including English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.

Bring in Best Practices

From designing a reporting strategy to working out which custom reports are suited to which team members, your expert will use best practices to ensure these reports are delivered to the people who need them most. The beauty of an outsider’s input is that your business also benefits from the wisdom gained from other clients and how they use their data. Every single team member will be freed up to work on their value-add tasks, rather than wasting time trying to cut through endless data. Competitiveness will soar.

Connect the Smaller Dots

Some of the more nitty gritty benefits of using Consultative Intelligence will be found in the details, rather than in the bigger picture. Things like an increase in corporate-card rebates, the elimination of delinquent credit card payments and late fees. You also might see a reduction in the cost of your highest expense lines and be able to more easily identify employees whose spending is out of policy. Where there are unused discounts, unnecessary spending and potential fraud or additional airline ancillary fee spend, these will be uncovered. 

As a business, you can monitor supplier spend and identify negotiation opportunities and, moving forward, introduce processes that encourage more cost-efficient purchases. With all this increased visibility and analysis, your business will never have been so prepared for an internal or external audit.

Day-to-day, you’ll be able to more effectively manage company resources and keep an eye on cashflow, at a time when managers are more keen than ever to ensure employees are spending appropriately against their budget but don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it. 

Consultative Intelligence will support your business’ evolution through a continued, increasingly meaningful partnership, always keeping one eye on strategy, using data that backs up every decision going forward. For more information check out our web page here. And to see how SAP Concur solutions can do more than just manage spend take a look at our eBook Think You Know SAP Concur: Think Again?