To arm itself for regional expansion, Terumo collaborated with PwC and SAP Concur to streamline its travel and expense process to increase productivity and administrative efficiency, enhance compliance and controls, and improve its overall employee experience.
Client: Terumo Asia Holdings Pte Ltd
Industry: Medical technology
Powered by: SAP Concur - Travel and expense management software
SAP Best Run Awards for SEA 2021: Winner
This client success story has won “The small and mighty emerging frontier market award” recognising organisations that demonstrate an enterprising mindset and the capability to scale beyond its current market(s).
Learn more about the award
Setting the scene
Terumo is a global leader in the medical technology industry and has been committed to “Contributing to Society through Healthcare”. Terumo envisions the Asian region to become increasingly “borderless” in the future, by embracing the technology and embarking on a digital transformation journey. As a stepping stone, Terumo Asia Holdings – the Asia Pacific regional headquarters – decided to digitise and integrate its travel and expense policies, processes and system across all Terumo Asia Pacific companies in the ASEAN Region. Their key objectives were to attain harmonised regional processes, increase efficiency and compliance, enhance user experience, drive automation and harness real-time visibility and data to make informed decisions.
“Terumo's expansion is underpinned by the 'gemba' philosophy and is driven by four key imperatives: growth, efficiency, talent and culture. By creating an enterprise-wide shift to streamline and standardise internal processes and controls - while increasing engagement and bringing meaningful insights to empower decision making - this puts us in the right place for sustainable growth.”
Issues and challenges
Terumo Asia lacked real-time access to consolidated regional data and analytics of its travel and expenses across its Singapore-based regional headquarters and 8 entities located in Asia Pacific. Terumo associates used a manual process to claim their travel and expenses, supported by disparate policies, fragmented local and customised expense management systems that were not integrated to their finance system. Terumo associates’ experience was poor, requiring paper handling and out-of-the systems approvals. In addition, the lack of visibility around fraud and policy compliance increased risks.
How we helped
PwC South East Asia Consulting worked closely with Terumo to implement SAP Concur and achieve a holistic integrated implementation approach to align travel and expense policies, processes and systems. All Terumo HR and Finance stakeholders worked together to create an enterprise-wide shift to streamline business processes and spend categories that would be scalable across regions. Guided by PwC proven methodologies, hands-on training sessions and leveraging best-in-class standards, Terumo was successful in rolling out SAP Concur within a short six-month timeline, with the necessary room for local regulatory requirements or ways of business. The solutions are simple for Terumo associates to navigate, easy to maintain over time as the organisation expands, and provides visibility to leadership on spend management for cost optimisation.
- Quick 6-month implementation of the new standardised travel and expense policy, process and system for all 8 entities.
- Standardisation and streamlining of 18 legacy policies into one enterprise-wide travel and expense policy.
- 98% of associates across all levels of the organisation recognise the painless and seamless policy compliance enforcement enabled with built-in audit rules and automation.
- For the first-time, real-time data insights available on the expenses requested and incurred.
- Finance quickly drove efficiency with designing advanced reports a few weeks after going-live to support in enforcing costs controls.
- Reduction of IT costs by eliminating the need to maintain fragmented, disparate and customised legacy expenses management systems.
- Automation and scalability of the system with an end-to-end integration between SAP Concur and existing SAP systems.
- Reduction by 100% of manual forms for expense claims allowing to go paperless.
- Enhanced user experience with 95% users preferring to use SAP Concur and moving away from manual expense claims to a digital, cloud-based system with real-time visibility from report to reimbursement.
- Ease of navigation and access through web and mobile is the first top 3 factors driving Terumo associates to embrace technology.
- Empowerment of associates to comply with the new travel and expense policy.
- Built-in audit rules and automated approval workflow enhanced with alert notifications resulted in a fast pace adoption with the number of reports created every week to be x2 or x3 from the previous week.
- Hands-on training approach is a key differentiator to facilitate associates to become familiar and fully embrace the new policies and system.
"Terumo's mission is contributing to society through healthcare. The digitalisation of Terumo's regional offices to a single platform on SAP Concur is imperative to driving change and achieving economies of scale, transparency and maximum efficiency. To achieve sustainable growth across ASEAN, Terumo recognised the need to be agile and to embrace an enterprising mindset through digital transformation. At PwC, we are honored to work with clients like Terumo and SAP who echo our purpose to build trust in society and to solve important and complex problems.”
