Concur empowers AirAsia to soar to new heights

Naresh Alagan, Chief Executive Officer, AirAsia Global Shared Services

TAGUIG CITY, Philippines – Concur, an SAP company, announced recently a collaboration with AirAsia to implement an integrated Travel and Expense solution for its subsidiary AirAsia Global Shared Services, which provides business process outsourcing services to AirAsia Group’s 17,000 employees.

Air Asia needed a solution which would be simple to use and make travel expensing painless, as well as reduce paper usage and the time required to raise and claim travel expenses. It must also be secure both from an integrity and data security perspective.

AirAsia is Asia Pacific’s largest low-cost carrier, with scheduled domestic and international flights to over 100 destinations from Japan to India. AirAsia’s main hub is KLIA2, the no-frills terminal at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Sepang, Selangor, Malaysia. All of AirAsia’s Kuala Lumpur departures and arrivals operate through this terminal.

“Even under normal circumstances, travel claims and co-ordination are complex. Magnify that by a thousand-fold and we realised that we were under real pressure to look towards an integrated, simplified solution to replace the current manual in-house duty travel approval system which has separate flight and hotel bookings. We needed something that would provide a quick one-stop solution as the travel expense claims were being managed across six locations in nine subsidiaries independently. Concur’s solution was offered and we were impressed by its ability to tightly integrate our systems,” says Naresh Alagan, Chief Executive Officer, AirAsia Global Shared Services.

Towards this aim, Concur implemented their Travel and Expense solution with the Policy Audit, Travel Allowance and VAT Configuration modules on cloud for AirAsia Global Shared Services. The aim was to reduce travel and expense management impact to all AirAsia Group employees, and in particular for AirAsia Global Shared Service and Finance staff.

“We wanted to help AirAsia employees spend as little time as possible on less value-added activities such as managing duty travel and more on growing the business. The shift to digitised claims is a step towards a paperless environment as we continue to utilise more cloud solutions. Concur’s Travel and Expense solution key enabling benefit will be to streamline and abbreviate AirAsia’s travel expense process,” says Naresh.

“Due to the nature of our business, the travel requirement on staff is high and once the Concur Solution is rolled out, we are confident that staff are able to better focus on their work and worry less about reimbursements and approvals,” adds Naresh.

The implementation for Concur’s solution is expected to be completed by early July this year. Once live, it will allow users to raise close to 100% of travel approvals, travel claims and hotel bookings, allowing the centralised travel desk to handle exceptional cases, make flight bookings and reconciliations for payroll expense claims and hotel payments. The solution will allow up to 10 persons across the AirAsia Group to be reassigned to more value-adding duties.

Naresh continues: “This ability to raise travel approvals, make and pay for hotels and claim expenses all through a single app is a revolution from our current, outdated manual process. The future addition of flight bookings for employees will complete the value chain, reflecting innovative cross-collaboration opportunities when these benefits are available to all Concur clients. The aim is to make life easier for employees all across the world. We are and always will be a business built on innovation, creating opportunities for communities and bridging boundaries.”

“Concur serves over 32,000 customers and 32 million users globally. Our clients appreciate the visibility and data analytical capabilities across business travel and spend management, robust policy compliance and ease of use experience for their employees.  We are pleased to provide Air Asia Global Shared Services with best-in-class integrated travel and expense management solutions and services,” says Madanjit Singh, Managing Director, Concur South East Asia.

“SAP is proud to support our local carrier, AirAsia which is recognized and applauded internationally, with cloud solutions from Concur to enable them to meet their key objectives of cost reduction, employee satisfaction and easier access to duty travel. The aviation market here is facing intense competition from international carriers and pressure from aviation regulations for higher integration and efficiencies. Once implemented, this objective for AirAsia would be met,” says Terrence Yong, Managing Director, SAP Malaysia.