Recap: Higher Education Leadership Forum
Last week, we gathered some of the best minds in higher education procurement, finance and travel management for the 5th annual Concur Higher Education Leadership Forum (CHELF) in Boulder, CO. With more than 100 attendees, this was the largest gathering of Concur higher education customers to-date. Attendees included representatives from 45 schools from across the country looking to learn best practices from their peers, discuss challenges and learn about what is next from Concur. A special thanks to the University of Colorado for hosting this successful and highly informative event!
Day one welcomed us with sunny and 70 degree temperatures as well as a day focused on topics including benchmarking, best practices with travel requests, common practices from the front lines, campus customer perspectives, and small group discussions on topics like audit rules and practices, implementation, guests and students, locate/duty of care, security, TMC partnership, and travel policy, just to mention a few. Panel discussions included representatives from Arizona State University, Cornell University, and University of Colorado.
Tuesday evening offered the opportunity to tour part of the CU campus and dinner with a view of the iconic Folsom Field. This allowed for the attendees to continue to network with other attendees and discuss relevant topics that impact those in Higher Ed.
Day two kicked off with an “Ask the Experts” panel discussion with folks from The University of Colorado, Christopherson Business Travel, and Huron Consulting and continued with a discussion about Concur’s new Whitepaper, “Back Office Optimization” which was developed in partnership with the Concur Higher Education Advisory Board (CHEAB). The whitepaper covers four key topics relevant to Higher Ed customers – The need to automate your T&E program; what to audit when; which metrics matter; and communicating creatively with everyone involved in the process. The conference and day wrapped with a sharing of best practices in training resources.
Travel is a reality and daily occurrence at higher education institutions around the globe. Colleges and universities often face unique challenges that make all of the above issues important to discuss. More specifically, higher education institutions have a diverse traveler set, their travel details are often in disparate systems and ownership resides across multiple departments. We are happy to provide a forum where our Higher Ed customers can learn from each other and walk away with a larger network of peer support, and gain a new understanding of best practices and ideas to make improvements at their institutions.
For Concur, this time with our customers is invaluable and we use what we learn to develop products and resources that continue to help our customers better manage travel and expenses for their institution. We thank everyone who helped organize, attended and made this gathering a great success! We look forward to seeing and hearing from everyone again soon!
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