SharePoint 2007, 2013, 2016
InfoPath
Banking & Finance, Pharmaceutical
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Canada, Ireland, Hungary, Cayman Islands, Jersey, Bermuda, Singapore, the UK
21 MDs
Our client has decided to improve and modernize their document management solutions for international business trip administration.
To be more specific, the company asked Consovenio to digitize its process of business trip planning and approval. This was no simple task; in fact, implementing a solution was rather challenging because it involved multiple departments (HR and Finance) and a whole set of procedures. To provide you with an overview of these procedures, it's best to divide them into three parts: approving the trip proposal, calculating its expenses, and processing expense reimbursement in the financial department. Our software had to manage several trip-related considerations to perform the second step of calculating expenses. These included the allocation of travel and meal allowance - both of which are determined based on the length and the destination of the trip. Carrying out the third step of processing expense reimbursement likewise required dealing with a lot of information. In this case, our application had to assist the financial department in processing hotel receipts, conference tickets, taxi bills, and various other travel expenses.
To understand how the client's business trip management functions, we started out by analyzing their workflow.
Our SharePoint architects examined all the details of the trip planning process, and the operational methods of the HR and Finance departments. This knowledge of how the company's business trips were organized proved highly beneficial - it led us to design a dynamic web form that we implemented in the client's SharePoint intranet environment. The insights that we gained into the work processes of HR and Finance were no less fruitful; they enabled our team to facilitate interdepartmental collaboration by creating custom workflows. These workflows would distribute the data from the web form to the software integration solutions used by these two departments.
Buttressed by our enhanced Intranet functionality, Consovenio's business trip planning solution transformed a process that was completely reliant on paperwork into fully digital SharePoint workflows with the following features:
Planning: Destination, trip length, approval, border crossing timing, allowance estimates, etc.
Allowance calculation: Based on the client's internal policies and trip parameters
Allowance processing: Based on the trip's actual cost (not the estimate) and handled by the financial department
A large part of the business trip management work, described directly above, could now be easily taken care of by the employees themselves - from any of the locations where the company operates
We have succeeded in considerably improving the business trip planning process. Our digitized one-stop solution significantly simplified all of the myriad and complex tasks involved in approving and reimbursing business trips. The benefits of leaving behind the confusion of manually dealing with paperwork and procedures cannot be understated. The company and its employees certainly preferred our intelligent application that appropriately handles all of the relevant information - and provides clear step-by-step guidance. The best part is that the application continues to function perfectly over the long term and doesn't become obsolete. This is because our Microsoft developers update the forms and the workflows to comply with changes in either legislation or the client's own business trip-related policies.