To Fuel Productivity, Focus on the System, Not the Employee

Unproductive employees could be costlier to your company than you might think. According to McKinsey, more than half of surveyed employees say they’re relatively unproductive at work, and this lost productivity could even cost a company between $228 million and $355 million a year.

So, what can business leaders do to increase employee productivity? Meaningful boosts to productivity happen at the organizational level, not the individual level, by building efficient systems and adopting the right tools. Instead of enhancing the productivity of individual employees, it’s about creating a work environment where everyone can naturally get more done.

Here are a few ways that you can set employees, and your company, up for success.

Digitization

Digitization is the process of turning non-digital information into a digital format, and it can make business tasks simpler and more efficient. Consider the process of submitting an expense report following a business trip. Employees gather a mix of receipt formats while traveling. Although the plane ticket receipt and final hotel bill may be delivered via email, employees are likely carrying around a handful of paper receipts from restaurants, cab rides, and more. Digitizing these receipts can help reduce the chances of something getting lost, and it can speed up the expense report process for faster reimbursement.

ExpenseIt makes it easy to take photos of receipts and send them directly to Concur Expense. It uses the latest technology, like generative AI and machine learning, to identify critical data and automatically categorize and itemize expenses in a report for review and submission. It also recognizes and processes receipts in many languages, so travelers going abroad can benefit from the productivity boost of digitization as well.

Automation

Automation is no longer limited to hardware solutions—now, especially with generative AI and large language models, software is helping organizations automate processes to enhance productivity. Two tedious tasks related to spend management, purchase approvals and expense audits, are prime candidates for automation to help speed things up, take work off employees’ plates, and generate valuable insights to inform future forecasting.

Concur Request simplifies requests and approvals through automation for better budget control and policy compliance enforcement. It helps establish an authorization process for employees and those responsible for approving requests, capturing key information for quick and easy decision-making. It can even help employees source cost estimates for travel, through its Request Assistant feature.

Verify is another SAP Concur solution that uses automation to streamline work and increase productivity. Instead of requiring that the company’s finance team conduct manual audits of all expense reports, Verify uses intelligent technology to review submitted expenses for policy compliance and discrepancies so auditors can focus on the highest-risk transactions. Verify can also help identify spending patterns that manual processes may not, offering the company an extra line of defense against fraud.

Integration

Even as companies embrace technology to streamline travel and expense (T&E) processes, data silos remain an organizational pain point. Our sixth annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey found that, according to 31% of travel managers, managing travel spending without access to all traveler T&E data is making it difficult for them to be successful in their role.

This is why integrated solutions are so important. It is hard to manage travel and spend, together, when respective solutions can’t communicate with each other. And it is even harder to understand their impact on the business when T&E data isn’t accessible beyond the travel and finance teams. Integration is one of the most critical features of SAP Concur solutions, including Concur Travel and Concur Expense, as well as SAP software and technology more broadly.

Learn More

While the productivity of each employee has an impact on business performance, enabling employees to perform at their best requires taking a more macro perspective. It comes down to the processes, tools, and systems that the organization has in place.

For more about SAP Concur solutions and how they can fuel productivity, read our blog post, “The Connection Between T&E Tools and Organizational Productivity.”