Redefining the Meaning of Paper Trail: An SAP Concur Conversation with George Washington University

Learn how George Washington University revolutionized their spend management system from outdated and clunky to streamlined and efficient by implementing SAP Concur solutions. “Back prior to going into [SAP] Concur, we were at about a 60% electronic [invoices], which means using interfaces or other processes to get things [to] us, and the rest was all manually keyed. And now we're at about a 98% of all electronic coming into our systems,” shared Shelley Shearer, Director of University Payables at GWU. In this compelling podcast, you will hear from Shearer and Donna Ginter, Associate Vice President of Supply Chain at GWU, about their 10-year transformation story with SAP Concur solutions.

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Transcript:

Interviewer:

Today, we're talking to George Washington University's Shelley Shearer and Donna Ginter about how modernized financial management systems help the university to streamline its processes and drive greater transparency. Shelley is director, university payables, and Donna is associate vice president, supply chain. Hi Shelley, hi Donna.

Shelley Shearer:

Hi.

Donna Ginter:

Hello.

Interviewer:

Can you give us a quick history about GWU's use of SAP Concur? Where did you start off and how did the use cases expand?

Shelley Shearer:

So this is Shelley, I can start in and then Donna can jump in after that. We started with expense, I think travel started prior to that, but in 2012, and we were completely paper-driven prior to that, the stacks of paper on desks, everything got in our company.

Shelley Shearer:

And when we went live with expense, we went as it required to use Concur for all employees going forward, no pilot groups or rollouts for that. And then in 2019, we added the invoice pilot phase that we did do in a phased approach.

Donna Ginter:

This is Donna. GW started with Concur as part of an RFP to do an integrated travel and expense system. I think the RFP went out in 2010 and ultimately was awarded in 2011. We went live with travel before expense because we had a lot of integration required for the expense component, but travel for the most part was brought to us through a TMC. GW currently uses travel, expense, request, invoice, expense pay, anything else I missed, Shelley?

Shelley Shearer:

Reporting and Capture, which is under invoice.

Donna Ginter:

Reporting and Capture, yes. And we have intelligence as part of all of that.

Interviewer:

And you've recently started leveraging these tools in support of the Medical Faculty Associates or MFA. Who makes up that user base and why do they need a new approach to financial management?

Donna Ginter:

The Medical Faculty Associates is a practice of doctors in a variety of disciplines, along with the staff that support the doctors, but those doctors and the medical faculty associates group are also faculty for the George Washington University.

Donna Ginter:

They are faculty and part of the GW system, let's say, when they deal with research and teaching requirements and so forth. But when they move over into their doctor's office, let's say, and they're practicing the medicine that they teach at GW, they become part of the medical faculty associates, which is a separate affiliate, let's say, of the university.

Interviewer:

So that's who they are, and why did they need new tools around financial management?

Donna Ginter:

There was a turnover in leadership at the MFA and GW used to be unified with the MFA years ago. The financial integration that currently exists grew out from a former relationship. And instead of having the MFA stand alone, they decided they would bring them back in under the university umbrella to give greater support to them since it was part of the GW, let's say, umbrella of services.

Donna Ginter:

And the most efficient way of doing that was for GW university to share its infrastructure with the medical faculty associates, which was itself a much smaller organization than the university. And the MFA was more than happy to move into Concur. They knew that they had some issues with their financial system that didn't allow for great reporting or visibility into spend or reimbursements.

Interviewer:

Let's talk about visibility. What can the MFA see now that they couldn't see before and why does it matter?

Donna Ginter:

Shelley, you want to start?

Shelley Shearer:

I'll start on this one, this is Shelley. Concur has given them the ability to see the whole spectrum of the invoices. Since before their invoices were just paper going to various desks, now they can see it since we're using Capture, the invoices coming in, where they're assigned, who they're with, they can see the entire process of who they go to for approval, we can now benchmark how long things are spending with certain people, spending with departments.

Shelley Shearer:

They didn't have any kind of reporting or really visual of the overall spend of these departments or where things were going and now that we're getting them onto POs and we're getting reporting out to them for their accrual bases, they're being able to see everything from start to finish, so they know what their spend is across the board.

Shelley Shearer:

It also gives them access to the request tool, which we're a little bit different. We don't use that for travel so much as we use it for all of our forms. And now we've also implemented the p-card usage with MFA, which they had not had previously really.

Shelley Shearer:

So they're able to now put a vast majority of some of their spend on p-cards, getting that out to the suppliers faster, making supplier relationships better because things aren't being held up by paper invoices going through a process. So they're getting a lot of use out of this and we've had some positive feedback so far.

Interviewer:

Well, let's go further down that road of outcomes. Can you give some other specific examples of how these new processes have benefited the MFA or even the university in general? What specifically does this enable?

Donna Ginter:

Shelley, I'll take this question. So the MFA processes prior to joining GW's umbrella with Concur were very basic. They would use an Excel spreadsheet to make a request for a good or a service. That request would go over to the procurement office and the procurement office would create a requisition, then create a purchase order.

Donna Ginter:

The way invoices were paid against those purchase orders where the invoice would come into the various different practices at the MFA, somebody would write an account code on it and then send it back to procurement for processing. And given the technology that's available these days, that certainly isn't the best practice.

Donna Ginter:

They were also finding that they were losing their invoices left and right, there were disgruntled vendors not getting paid on time and GW, as part of this enablement or encompassing of their systems over there, we gave them the ability to notify their vendors to send the invoices into the Capture website. We shortcutted it, it's invoice@mfa.gwu.edu.

Donna Ginter:

The folks at the MFA, unlike the university, embrace the use of Capture right upfront. They've even put that requirement within the signatures that they have on their email addresses so that when they speak to the vendor community, the vendors know right away, "Okay, if I have an invoice, I'm sending it into Capture."

Donna Ginter:

And from that, suddenly we saw everything that needed to be paid out there for the MFA. And this has given us great reporting as far as what needs to be accrued at the end of the month, what invoices had not been paid in the prior year because we went live on day one of a new fiscal year, so we could see what was going on.

Donna Ginter:

Now, that doesn't mean we have a complete picture immediately because we're still discovering things that we weren't aware of, and this is six months into the transition at this point, but it is far better than anything we've seen before. Concur allows us not only to automate the invoice receipt process and get it into a system that routes for approval and allocation and all that sort of thing, but the system also watches and tracks when people haven't taken action on something.

Donna Ginter:

So if an invoice has been submitted for approval, for instance, it will be tracked, and after a certain number of days, kicked back to the person who submitted it for approval saying, "Hey, listen, you need to contact that manager or the person who approves this after you so that they can formally approve it because it's just been sitting in their inbox for a while, it can't sit there any longer, so it returned."

Donna Ginter:

So that helps us keep things moving along, plus the reporting out of Concur allows us to see the status of anything at any given time, which is wonderful. I'd also like to put a plug in for the fact that as administrators, Shelley, and myself and the people on Shelley's team, we're able to quickly see what's coming in, see that it might be assigned to the wrong person, move it around to the right person and get things moving all the time, almost like a train conductor, let's say.

Donna Ginter:

We're moving stuff around and making sure it's going through the system as it should be. That's very difficult to do when you have just a paper based operation.

Shelley Shearer:

And on top of that, it's given us a lot of ease of removing other manual things. The MFA also... This is Shelley, sorry. They also had to do things such as anytime a new employee came on board, they had to manually add that person to their system to pay the expenses from as well as attach accounting codes to each and every person and then remove that if there was a transfer or a change over, whereas we get all that into Concur from a daily feed.

Shelley Shearer:

So that's a huge load off of manually keeping track and of the potentially errors being put in the system so they can have all that. And now that we have all these audit rules built in, it helps us with getting things in in a timely manner, we have a 60-day rule to have out of pockets put through which they did not have previously, so now we're getting that stuff hitting our books much faster and on a much more regular basis.

Shelley Shearer:

We have things like the Amazon Business integration, where we get those receipts on our p-cards, the rich card data, which has helped alleviate a lot of the receipts that we needed to get. We also use the per diem aspects and the missing receipt affidavits. So we try and utilize every aspect we possibly can. We're very strong on going as automated as possible.

Shelley Shearer:

And I pulled a couple of numbers. Back prior to going into Concur, we were at about a 60% electronic, which means using interfaces or other processes to get things into us, and the rest was all manually keyed. And now we're at about a 98% of all electronic coming into our systems. You're probably never going to get to a hundred percent because there's always those outliers that still need to be touched, but we're at a really high basis of being as paperless as possible and we want to keep expanding that wherever we can.

Interviewer:

Along those same lines, a lot of universities wrestle with purchase order management in particular. How does your approach simplify that?

Donna Ginter:

GW is very fortunate to be a private nonprofit university. We are not subject to the same guidelines, for instance, that state universities follow. That allows us to be a bit more creative in how we handle our finances. Now, when I say creative, that doesn't mean we're giving up the necessary controls or checks and balances, but what we're able to do is determine what can and cannot be processed with a purchase order.

Donna Ginter:

We have a lot of exemptions to purchase orders that grant us flexibility in how we use the Concur system. We're able to require POs for certain things that have documentation requirements. And those sorts of things are federal funds and grants and things that require competition.

Donna Ginter:

But if we've deemed that something is being acquired that doesn't require competition or is of a special nature, for instance, let's say it's a purchase being made from a governmental entity, take a permit, let's say, for construction, we have said we don't need to have a PO for that, you have options on how you can process that request for payment. You can put it directly in Concur and we can cut you a check, you can use your procurement card, which ultimately the transaction runs through Concur and we see it there.

Donna Ginter:

The purchase order management component where most institutions require a purchase order created from a requisition that then goes to a receiver in order to get paid, we use the Concur system as the authorization to make a payment because the approval or the submission of the invoice by the end user with the subsequent approval from the secondary person on that invoice is our proof of receipt of the good or service and we just go ahead and pay it.

Donna Ginter:

So purchase order management has become easier for us. We save that, let's say, for the more complex purchases that we make, not the majority of the small dollar items that we're putting through.

Interviewer:

In addition to the ways already mentioned, how does SAP Concur help to support your ambitions to be a paperless enterprise?

Donna Ginter:

This is Donna. When we went live with SAP Concur... The overall use of Concur is a significant investment by any organization. And of course you want to make the highest and best use of technology that you can, you want to get the most bang for your buck when you use Concur. GW does not require pre-trip authorizations, which is typically what the request module is used for by Concur's customers.

Donna Ginter:

GW took a look at requests and said, "Hey, this is a great tool, how can we use this to remove paperwork that we have that supplements the payment processes across the university?" As an example, I'll use some of the forms that we have created. We took the procurement card application form, placed that form online through Concur's request module with multiple fields and customized it so that someone now will go into Concur and place a request for a p-card.

Donna Ginter:

That routes through the system with approvals and ends up with Shelley's team for the p-card office, where the form is extracted and then sent off to the card program. We ensure that we have all the information we need using a Concur profile to create a card request through the bank. Ultimately that's issued.

Interviewer:

Let's talk about governance and compliance. At a higher level, how do these tools help to drive policies and procedures, both to shape them and to enforce them?

Shelley Shearer:

This is Shelley, I can start on this one. We use reporting quite a bit to determine where we want to move forward and where we have issues. We use it to determine what departments might need more training or refresher training, and it also helps us determine our audit rules, and actually going back to the paper list thing, remove extra paper.

Shelley Shearer:

For instance, we were for the longest time requesting itemized receipts for anything $35 and under. And we were able to move that up to $75 and under based on doing a mass review of a year's worth of spend to see what those small dollar items are and what kind of risk they've presented by not getting those receipts, do we really need a receipt for every bottle of water or cup of coffee?

Shelley Shearer:

And you think in terms of someone traveling for two weeks, that's every $2 receipt they've got to upload, and then someone has to review it and approve it, and then on our side, someone then has to review it again for an audit trail. So taking out those hundreds of line items of small, low risk things, based on our report's findings, saved a great amount of time and processing time for getting a person from entry into the system and paid.

Shelley Shearer:

So using reporting, we're able to find areas like that where we can speed up processes and change how we manage expenses and make it a more user friendly area.

Interviewer:

Finally, let's take a look at what's ahead. Are there any future plans for further expansion of your SAP Concur implementations?

Shelley Shearer:

Do you want our whole wishlist or-

Interviewer:

How long is it?

Shelley Shearer:

Well, GW, we tend to be Guinea pigs kind of thing, we always want to try the new things. We are very game to be as electronic as possible and use AI and get away from every manual concept we can. As part of what Donna was saying, we use the request forms, and one of the things we use that for is our correction forms when you need to move an account from one to another.

Shelley Shearer:

And currently we only use that for our GL side, and I'd really like to see the grant side go through that as well, that has a bit more complex complexity to it. Personally, I would like to, and I believe Donna as well, we want to streamline our invoice processing. That role of invoice oversight only recently came under us and we're trying to really reevaluate it and see where we can do some of those reporting and audit rules and make that flow through much quicker.

Shelley Shearer:

We're also adding employees to our expense pay program, which is another thing I don't think we mentioned, but we use the expense pay process through expense. We really try and use all of Concur that we can. I think Donna might have other wishlist items.

Donna Ginter:

We always are pushing you all or Concur to do more with the tools that you have. We run Concur expense and we run Concur invoice, and those are two separate modules that at this point don't really talk to each other. We run our p-card transactions, and at GW, you can use your p-card to pay a whole slew of invoices outside of running them through the invoice system.

Donna Ginter:

But Shelley is charged with also making sure that if you're processing a p-card transaction for a payment, that the university or that Concur has not been used to process an invoice for the same item. So we are checking for duplicate payments to ensure that we don't have them, not after the fact, but in advance.

Donna Ginter:

We are looking to see what we can do to blend the two systems within Concur, expense and invoice, to make sure that we catch invoice payments that potentially could be duplicates in advance of making them and not after the fact. So we're pretty good at catching them after the fact if they occur, which is rare, but we'd like to catch them beforehand. So that's what's on the horizon for us.

Interviewer:

That's great. I'd like to thank both of you for taking the time today. This was extremely informative and I appreciate the level of detail that you've provided in helping us all to understand how you're putting the tools of SAP Concur to use.