Automating expense management for a supplier in Oil & Gas
Location: USA
Industry: Oil & Gas
Problems
The company faced an increasing challenge of timely approving travel expenses originating from different departments. The format and process each department followed to approve travel expense was different from each other.
Mostly it consisted of:
- Paper-based expense approval forms
- An exchange of several emails back and forth between employees and approving managers
- In-person follow-up making the whole process time consuming
This resulted in:
- Unnecessary delay in travel-expense voucher approval
- Duplication in recording travel expenses
- Creation of a backlog (of approval requests) which resulted in departments circumventing the approval process
- Lack of a reporting (such as summarizing travel costs by department)
Solutions
Allied Consultants developed an expense manager intranet portal (based on SharePoint Server (MOSS, a portal-based platform) for the customer. It consisted of a simple excel-like user interface for managers and administrators to approve travel expenses of different departments. Whenever an employee initiated a request for expense approval, the request remains in one of the four states (Draft, Pending Approval, Approved and Rejected).
The key features of the solution included:
Solutions
- User Role Configurations (employees,, administrators, managers)
- Email notifications (to concerned parties) upon approval of requests
- Pre-defined templates for travel expense requests (reducing the time users took to get familiar with using the ‘Expense Manager’)
- InfoPath Forms rules updating
- Customizable display settings (based on user role)
- Ability to print as well as export expense reports in multiple formats (PDF, CSV.) from within the portal
Tech Stack
- Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
- ASP.NET 4.0, JQuery
- Sage Adonix X3
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