How Brother UK Elevated Employee Experience with Automated Business Spend Management

Finance automation, particularly in the area of spend management, creates a plethora of business benefits, not all of them as obvious as others. Spend visibility and control is a given, as businesses strive to maximise efficiency and compliance. But did you know that the impact of spend management automation on employee retention, engagement and productivity can be equally as dramatic? This benefit was one of many that Brother UK experienced when it rolled out SAP Concur solutions across its European offices.

Prior to the project, Brother controlled spend across disjointed spreadsheets, local systems and some SAP Concur solutions, but by bringing all business spend management under one platform, the organisation boosted employee experience and drove value directly back into the bottom line.

What Are the Factors That Influence Employee Retention?

Employees tend to seek organisations that value their time and expertise and empower them to fulfil their role, rather than being bogged down in boring, cumbersome tasks such as chasing invoices or filing expenses. 

Staff retention is a core value at Brother – the organisation has an impressive track record with the average length of service in Europe in the mid-teens, with many employees staying loyal for 30 or 40 years.

Stuart Maclean, Head of Finance & Corporate Planning at Brother UK, says holding onto the huge amount of wealth and talent they had across Europe was a key driver and benefit of automated business spend management.

“We felt we could gain more value, whilst giving our employees more interesting work, by using automation and AI to remove some of that repetitive manual work,” he says.

For example, by introducing Intelligent Audit, Brother was able to liberate one particular team member from manual tasks, allowing her to undertake an accountancy qualification and apply for a role within the Treasury department with the newly-available time.

 “We’ve been able to retain that knowledge and that talented individual within the business,” says Stuart.

 

Automate to Liberate: Give Employees a New Lease of Life

Take a look at the full case study and see how Brother UK improved visibility into spend data and enhanced employee experience by automating business spend management. 

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How Can Business Automation Improve Employee Engagement?

To retain talent, you need to give employees what they want, which is to do the skilled jobs  they were trained to do and to be able to do them from anywhere. 

According to a Gartner survey, 82% of businesses intend to maintain remote work at least part of the time. Empowering employees to work flexibly is one of the key suggestions in our Six Ways to Grow Your Business with Spend Automation, and with SAP Concur solutions, mobile apps allow for freedom to work from anywhere, at any time, as well as reducing frustration and improving accuracy.

Brother embarked on change management journey that allowed stakeholders and employees to understand the value of business process automation, and to see that, contrary to fears that AI and automation might put them out of a job, it actually frees them up to add more value to the business. 

“Employees are contributing to not only their own future, but the future of their colleagues and their business. Employees who feel they can contribute and who are confident are more likely to stay,” says Stuart.

How Can Business Automation Help Employee Productivity?

It’s not only employee experience that improves when you automate spend management, you’ll also experience a rise in employee productivity. Organisations that turn to digital technology to automate finance processes are seeing a 27% improvement in profitability and a 26% improvement in productivity.

By using Business Intelligence and Consultative Intelligence, Brother’s employees are able to track historic and current spend for better forecasting, build reports that they didn’t have time or capacity to do before and start to analyse spending and travel patterns that they can then feed back into the business.

“We weren’t looking to bring in robots onto a production line,” says Stuart. “We were looking for a solution that would improve visibility into spend data and enhance employee experience, enabling them to add value to the broader organisation in terms of reporting and analysis.”

Getting Buy-In for Automated Business Spend Management?

Communicating your intentions and gaining support is a key step in any automation rollout. Brother took a top-down approach and appointed ‘Expense Champions’ to fly the flag in each European office.

“Some of those individuals that were involved in the early rollout are now our biggest advocates, because they‘ve been through the change process. They have seen the benefit and they love their job more than they ever did before because they’re listened to and they’re engaged,” he says.

When looking at employee retention strategies, it’s crucial to consider the impact of business process automation. By doing this at the start of your journey and listening to your employees every step of the way, you can gain even more value from your employees – and they from you.

To find out more about how Brother UK elevated their employee experience with the help of automated business spend management and SAP Concur solutions, read the full case study.