Utilities companies with manual, paper-based systems must adopt cloud-based spend management software to efficiently manage expenses, receipts, reporting, auditing and compliance. By integrating with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and leveraging automation capabilities, SAP Concur empowers Government agencies to simplify financial data management, strengthen security posture and streamline mission-critical processes to improve data accuracy and integrity. Access the SAP Concur podcast to hear industry experts discuss how AI-powered expense management tools digitally capture receipts, centralize invoices and reduce audit risks for utilities companies. Explore how to maximize operational efficiency with built-in compliance governance and continuous monitoring features that enhance real-time decision-making. Fill out the form to unlock the SAP Concur podcast and learn how to streamline spend management for your organization.
Anthony Jimenez
Welcome to From Paper to Automation Productivity: Modernizing Travel & Expense in Utilities. When storms hit, when crews head out for mutual aid, or when big projects like solar farms come online—one challenge often hides in plain sight: managing travel, expenses, and compliance.
Travel and expense management is the quiet engine behind utility resilience and productivity.
Today, we’ll explore how utilities are moving from paper-based headaches to automated efficiency. Joining me are Jeremy Amos, our utility operations expert here at Phoenix Business Consulting, and Corina Sanchez, Director of Product Marketing for Regulated Industries at SAP Concur.
Let’s dive in—and see how automation powers resilience
David Szymanski
Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My name is David Szymanski.
I'm with Phoenix Business Consulting, and I'm going to be your moderator for today, for this session. And today we're going to talk about something we see all the time in the utility space. It's the everyday challenges around receipts, mileage, tracking, expenses, when your teams are out in field.
So utilities is a very unique industry because of all the workload that it's on the utilities. And the old manual ways of managing expenses, just it's difficult. It's really hard to do that.
So that's where SAP Concur and us, Phoenix, is really going to make a difference for you. We're going to go, we're going to walk through how Concur can help utilities, make receipt capturing easier with mobile. You can just snap a picture of your receipts, automatically track the mileage without really doing any guesswork of the mileage.
So it's going to cut down on the administration in any type of errors. So really it's in improving the transparency and, you know, for finances and in your operational teams. So at Phoenix business consulting, we work closely with utility companies and we understand the industry very well and know, you know, different pain points that you go through.
So today's agenda we're going to do, before we start, we'll do a quick company overview. We'll talk about the status quo, you know, why is T&E broken? You know, what are we looking for and how can we, you know, improve upon that?
The digital shift, you know, mobile first, that's part of AI as well and compliance cybersecurity. I know that's very important to utilities and it's building that trust. Mobile resilience and financial control.
And then we'll do some takeaways and then we'll, you know, close with some Q&A. And I do want to say we have some panelists with us today and any questions you have, if you can not put it in the chat, please, if you can just put it in the Q&A section, we'll be able to monitor that and answer any type of questions that you have. So Phoenix Business Consulting, you know, just kind of a quick overview, you know, who we are and, you know, what we can offer.
We're a premier provider of all SAP products and consulting services. So we offer a very wide range of products. Here's an overview of our services.
We're very proud to say we have over, you know, 350 plus customers and over 300 SAP consultants. And we're engaged with both the public sector and commercial enterprise. This next slide talks about Phoenix Business Consulting as a gold partner of SAP.
And what that means is a gold partner means we meet the highest standard criteria for expertise in the SAP world. We have a very strong team in the U.S. and globally. All our consultants here have at least 10 years of experience.
And I'm here to talk about Concur, which is going to be this little circle right over here. So this is kind of an overview of all the various different products that SAP has. And Concur is part of that suite of products.
Also, too, Phoenix Business Consulting is awarded the cooperative contracts. What that does, it allows Phoenix to offer public sector customers a faster, compliant, and really procurement-friendly path to SAP and Concur services. So what are the benefits of having a cooperative contract?
It's faster procurement, free negotiated competitive pricing, that's very key, and access to all the vendors that are vetted through the cooperative contracts. So these are some of the contracts that Phoenix Business Consulting holds. This next slide is just showing you some of the utilities that we have implemented and have relationships with throughout the years.
So these are all some of the premier utility companies that we work with. And then we're going to meet our experts. So we're very lucky to have Karina Sanchez.
She is the SAP Concur Director of Products. She has over 13 years of experience supporting regulated industries. And our own Jeremy Amos, 27 years in SAP focused in HR technology, experience with over a dozen utilities, probably way more than that.
And then myself, David. I'm the SAP Concur delivery lead with Phoenix Business Consulting. And now we're going to get into some questions and have a very open diagram and forum so we can talk freely.
And we have our experts on the panel today. So first question out of the gate is, what are some of the challenges you feel crews face today?
Jeremy Amos
I guess I'll start here. And maybe I'll do just a little bit of a preamble in that we have a variety of different folks on the phone from different types of utilities, and not all utilities are created equal. If you're in water, you have one set of issues.
If you're in electric, you have a different set. If you're in telecom, you might have a different set of challenges. But many of those challenges, many of those types of organizations have common thread across them.
And even those who are in the public side of the house, versus maybe it's a co-op, or maybe it is a commercial utility or investor owned utility. Again, slightly different challenges across each one, slightly different needs. But again, common thread of this notion of needing crews to be out in the field, to be out delivering services, repairing pipelines, fixing substations, building new.
And then what we see a lot on the commercial side is this continued push across state lines and expanding into new geographies, which is getting crews further and further away from home for longer periods of time. And of course, it gets aggravated by storm responses and things like that. So I think one of the things that's really challenging here is utilities do resist change like most organizations.
And I think there's some slowness, particularly because of some of the accounting rules specific to utilities that have to be followed. And so there's this embracing of, hey, I've got this great paper process or this digital form process that someone's manually keying in. And you love that process and it works.
But I think more and more, we really do need to see greater connection, greater automation, greater enablement of the crews in the field so that we don't have issues with lost receipts, late submissions, and that sort of thing. Then on the finance side, there's still challenges with delayed reporting, misalignments to budget, compliance headaches. We talk about FERC or NARUC or something like that.
We need to make sure that that reporting is accurate and timely. And really, that's where we see the biggest challenges today.
David Szymanski
Corina, want to add to that?
Corina Sanchez
Absolutely. So to Jeremy's point, across different utilities, excuse me, across both public and private, there's still this very human element of being able to meet crews and our fields where they're at. And the reality is that the further that you are from home, the more that you're on the road and maybe responding to an emergent situation, it's going to get sticky.
There's going to be friction. You're going to have paper receipts and the nature of those is that they get crumpled up. They're super likely to get lost or maybe in a rush, you forget to ask for one.
And a good tool should be able to anticipate this. It should be built to meet that traveler within their reality, exactly where they're at. So this could look like a tool that makes it easy to capture a receipt digitally instead of having to carry a bunch of receipts.
Or an even better experience is having an ecosystem so that these receipts automatically flow in. And the reason why this is important is that this doesn't just make life easier for the field. The more that you can reduce friction and frustration on the front end in the field experience, it clears the path for the rest of the process to be smooth all the way through the backend.
So something as common as a missing receipt, that can actually translate into a finance team spending weeks trying to reconcile expenses and things not quite matching up or not knowing what expense to tie back to a specific storm, maybe a specific project. So the more that you have these gaps, gaps in the process of capturing your receipt, of not losing them, of tying them to a project, as each phase continues, if you're missing documentation, your risk for an audit skyrockets. So the pain, the limitations of a manual system isn't just about a slow reimbursement cycle.
This goes as far as impacting financial accuracy, regulatory compliance, and overall operational readiness. So while the field may pay the initial price of a slow system, eventually the entire organization feels the pain.
David Szymanski
Thank you, Corina and Jeremy. That was very insightful. Interesting with the compliance and everything.
And next question to ask is, what does the automation system look like today?
[Jeremy Amos]
So that's a good one. And I would say mobile first. One of the things that beyond mobile first, which I guess is maybe a little bit of a played out statement these days, it has to be mobile first with machine learning, AI, all of the fancy technology words to make things easier for folks.
And I just think about some of my own travels around, which is far less complicated in some cases than some of these guys who are out in the field, is I'm grabbing something at a gas station for a drink or my lunch. I just need to take a picture of that receipt. And I don't want to have to look at it again.
The system really does need to interpret that receipt, fill in all the fields for me. And maybe all I'm going to do is just validate it at the end of the day and hit accept. One of the things that Karina mentioned just a minute ago was this whole notion of even an integrated ecosystem of vendors.
So if somebody has to take, maybe they had a late start and the crew had to go off and took the trucks and went on site. And you had to leave late because you weren't feeling well. You have to take an Uber.
Well, guess what? If you link your Uber account to Concur, that receipt will automatically load into your expense report. Or you're staying at a hotel, that hotel receipt can automatically fill into your expense report.
So this whole notion of, and I use this phrase a lot, is this unencumbered workday. I should be able to spend as least time with these administratia as possible because I have real work to do. And the system needs to be able to capture that data and make sure the right work orders are associated to it.
It needs to handle the per diem rules. If I'm flipping states, it needs to handle that because ultimately I'm working on a hurricane response or I'm on a construction site or I'm doing those things. System needs to deal with those things for me.
I don't want to have to worry about it.
David Szymanski
What you had mentioned, Jeremy, was the hotel and the automation of that. And I know the itemization of that is very key too, because that can be very cumbersome with the itemization of a hotel. And if it can capture that, that's powerful.
Jeremy Amos
It's so annoying to have to break out the taxes and kind of add that stuff together when you have 20 lines of taxes on your receipt. So yeah, it's nice that it takes care of those things for me.
David Szymanski
Corina, did you want to add something to that too as well?
Corina Sanchez
Yeah, absolutely. So first off, I think you would be hard-pressed to find someone who wants to spend more time in a travel and expense app. And in some ways, for as much as design and the user experience is top of mind, the best user experience is the one where it doesn't require you to be in the app, where it doesn't require that manual intervention.
To Jeremy's point, if you've ever had to manually break out a hotel folio, it's not a good use of time, right? It's not value-added. So a great app should keep this in mind.
That should be that guiding principle. A user should be able to have their information flow into the app from this ecosystem. And then in the event that something falls out of that, the app should allow for a quick, easy capture of the expense.
All of the related details are captured and flagged, and then move on. Move on with what is mission-critical for them. And this gets back to that point of where's the friction?
Removing that friction from the end-user experience, all while still providing the back office with the visibility that they need. And what's interesting is trying to solve for both, and being able to do so in a compliant manner. Because sometimes the idea of convenience, of making things easier and faster, can seem like it comes at a cost of, what am I doing it right?
And within SAP Concur, compliance is baked into the user experience. So for example, if an expense is incurred, and you use ExpenseIt to read the receipt instantly, an AI model reads what's on the receipt, matches it to policy, and can flag if, oh, this looks like this is above a certain spend, outside of the range of per diem. It's being able to almost outsource that piece of thinking that can make expense reporting a bit tedious, really allows for not just a better user experience, but more accurate, more real-time visibility for the back office.
David Szymanski
Very good point. And with audit control, you know, with matching the receipts with the audit, that saves a lot of time very well. Thank you, Corina and Jeremy, for that.
That was very insightful. Next question for our panel. So the T&E, how does travel and expense fit into the compliance and cyber risk?
Jeremy Amos
It's nothing about compliance. And I think Corina brings up these great points. This goes back to what we talked about in the beginning, about a little bit of the process being broken in so many companies, where you're juggling state rules.
You have to know the per diem per state. Obviously, there's other things going along with the reporting, making sure the right work orders are attached. In some cases, you have to deal with, I want to say, prevailing wage and other things associated that are outside of the world of time and expense or travel and expense.
But all of these things are just getting more and more complex, right? And for those organizations who are expanding in their geography, so maybe it's telecom or maybe it's electric utility or something like that, or you're in power gen, you know, your footprints get larger and larger, and those compliance risks just get more and more complicated. And again, we can't and shouldn't, as kind of back office professionals, shouldn't really expect the field workers to be able to handle all that and be able to cover all those things.
So the system really does need to cover it for you. But, you know, as we are automating these things, we're putting them into the cloud, we're expanding that footprint there. You know, we are dealing with people data, right?
And people data, even the smallest amount of people data is valuable. You know, in the marketplace, even just a list of names and emails, you know, can have thousands of dollars of, you know, dark web revenue associated to it. So we need to keep that stuff locked down.
And then in this particular case, we are dealing with financial transactions, right? So trying to make sure that we're meeting all these compliance needs, we're automating these things, we're keeping the data intact, but also making sure that it's very tightly secured, you're dealing with, you know, mobile devices, you're dealing with people in the field, you know, that stuff is important that it be sound technically, and that it be fully protected.
David Szymanski
Thanks, Jeremy. Corina, want to add to that too, as well?
Corina Sanchez
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when you think of where would a bad actor prioritize spending their time? Unfortunately, any organization that's related to infrastructure, to national security, are prime targets.
And we're seeing an increasing number of these threats. So it's super important to be proactive in choosing a solution that accounts for this, a solution that has a hardened security environment, and is continually monitoring and adjusting based off of the direction that threats are moving in. And this is one of the biggest advantages that Concur has, is there's a huge investment made into our security, not just offerings, because it's really baked into how our solutions are developed.
We have more security professionals than some competitors have employees, because of the sensitivity of data. So this is reflected in how our environments are architected. In CCPS, for example, being architected to meet NIST 853 standards, in our processes, in minimizing manual handling of data, ensuring that that data in environments like CCPS are residing within the US, enforcing security controls, and continuous monitoring.
And for Concur to take on the cost of continuous monitoring means that customers can rely and ensure that they can rest easy knowing that it's covered, and it's an expense that they don't have to take on.
Jeremy Amos
And just to add to that, one more thing, you know, this app also fits within your mobile device management framework, right? So your MDM tools. And so your IT departments can actually set it up to where not only is your MDM solution validating that the remote device is secure, and then it meets all the right protocols, but then they can also push this app out to the user, and make sure that the right servers are set up, the right authentication protocols, they can push that all out to the user, and the user doesn't have to worry about it. Now, if you choose to let them put it on their personal devices, you're obviously welcome to do that. And that also stays secure.
And there's protocols to manage that. So the application is really set up in such a way that it can handle the full breadth of, you know, the threat, you know, positioning of your organization. And to Corina's point, it's just getting more and more, particularly with infrastructure, like utilities.
So it's important that that flexibility is built into the tool.
[David Szymanski]
Great. A really good way to talk about that and discuss that, because security is a big topic, and there's a lot of risk involved with that too, as well. So really appreciate that, Corina and Jeremy, really insightful, very much.
All right, so moving on, we're going to move on to another topic is mobility, resilience, and the financial control. So in the big picture, what is the big picture? I mean, how is it impacting modernizing travel and expense?
Jeremy Amos
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a common theme here. And ultimately, the job of a utility, the core function of a utility is just getting harder. And it's getting more complicated, right?
So that operational resilience to be able to handle the different situations that are coming, either maybe it's an expansion, maybe it is infrastructure hardening, maybe it is dealing with a storm, you know, who knows what that is, those types of those activities across all the utilities that I've been speaking with have becoming more and more frequent, right? And so your ability to quickly adapt and be able to get your teams out there is critical. And it's not just about having, oh, great, we've got this tool, right?
Your employees have to be along for the ride. And, you know, if they need a, what do you call it, an advance, you need to be able to get them that advance quickly, and you need to be able to approve that quickly. And then you need to be able to capture that information and be able to reconcile against that advance.
All of these things have to be able to move quickly. And what you don't want are your crews saying, I'm not going to go out on the job, or I'm not going to volunteer for service in another state, because I don't know when I'm going to get paid. I can't afford that, right?
That shouldn't be an issue. You don't want administrative things holding you back. And so really, we need to kind of break those walls down and create that level of resilience around the time and expense category.
And all of that, right, while still making sure your capital project tracking, your reimbursements, that sort of thing are all being taken care of in the background.
David Szymanski
Corina, want to add to that too, as well?
Corina Sanchez
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, something that sticks out to me is that there's, I would say, an intro level to managing expenses is making sure that they're accurate, that they're compliant, that you're able to reimburse on time. And yes, a good solution should absolutely be able to offer that.
But in this environment where we're under pressure to do more with less, and there's such significant pressure to reduce costs, expense data can actually be a real gold mine of data that can be leveraged to find cost savings opportunities. So, with automated reports, when you have a system that's collecting trends that you're able to see, hmm, maybe I'm spending a certain amount with this hotel, can I negotiate a better rate? Or are there certain areas where we're going out of policy, over budget, certain ways that we're overspending?
The more that you're able to analyze these patterns that are coming up, the more you're able to anticipate project costs as they arise, negotiate with real data to be able to substantiate your case. It goes from being a cost center of having a tool to manage an operational need, to this gold mine of data that can help you run your business more efficiently. And that piece is really so critical for financial resilience, right?
It's an opportunity to take something that you already have access to and have that translate into returns back to the organization.
David Szymanski
Oh, two really interesting points with the financial control of that, too, as well. So, Corina and Jeremy, very insightful, very good information. So, what matters most going forward?
So, some of the key takeaways from this, and anybody out there, if you have any questions, please put them in the Q&A. We'll be monitoring those, and we'll start opening up to Q&A. But some of the key takeaways is the receipt capturing.
I hear that a lot. Reducing the errors, the administration work, as Jeremy, you had mentioned. It's giving the utility teams a faster, much cleaner way to manage their related expenses.
The built-in mileage tracking ensures. I heard the built-in mileage, that's big. That's using the AI technology.
It's going to help utilities avoid all the underpayments and improve the audits. That's really big in the industry. Yeah.
Jeremy Amos
Ultimately, yeah, your crews are not accountants, right? And they need to get on with their day. But I think one of the things that a lot of both accounting teams and HR teams, depending on who manages your T&E, have to reconcile is that there's lots and lots of data out there that shows self-service is more timely and more accurate.
But at the same time, again, they're not accountants either, right? So it needs to be easy. It needs to be thoughtful.
It needs to be quick, right? And today's modern tools, and especially Concur, do make that easy. And you can enable those folks.
You can give them the self-service. You can give them the power. And you can let the system do the work for you and still be able to be compliant.
And then the other piece we haven't really talked about is offline, right? Storms don't wait for Wi-Fi, is kind of the joke, I guess. But I'm going to be out in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe I'm building a substation, or maybe it's a water treatment, or whatever it is, or working on a reservoir. And I'm not going to have internet access. The thing still needs to work.
And I think those are the really big key pieces, the automation, the self-service, and offline, at least for me.
David Szymanski
Very good. Yeah. And Corina, did you want to add anything to that as a takeaway?
Corina Sanchez
Yeah. So I would add to that, in addition to all that automation offers that Jeremy just covered, it's also protection. It protects your employees.
It protects financial integrity. Because the outcome of this is that compliance becomes something that's built in, that's automated. It doesn't become this burdensome administrative task.
It's something as simple as just following the process, following the prompts within the application. And second to that, don't underestimate the insights that are buried in that expense data. It really is such a goldmine for allowing your finance teams to make better decisions.
David Szymanski
And I'm just looking at the time chat. We're doing really good on time. And we have a question that came in.
This might be more geared for Jeremy. How does this integrate with the ERP system?
Jeremy Amos
Yeah. And that's a great question. Without getting into too much detail on a call like this, I think one thing that's important is it's pretty seamless.
I've been a customer and a consultant of Concur and a user, I guess. And what's nice is even in ECC SAP, but definitely as you go into, for those of you interested in S4, it actually has almost seamless integration. So what does that mean?
It means that your cost objects, those things that are critical for your capital reporting, your funds and grants, and all that sort of thing, are fed into Concur so that people are actually putting their expenses to the right cost objects, the right capital accounts, the right work orders. And then so when the expenses pass through, those also then pass through seamlessly back into accounting. And because they're using validated objects, the data is coming in from the ERP into Concur, that means the data coming back out of it is much higher quality.
And so that's critical. For those folks who have a separate payroll system, again, the system can absolutely pull the core financial data from your S4 environment and send that to your Employee Central Payroll or whatever other payroll system you have. So you get to pick whether you want that to be an AP payment or do you want that to come to payroll.
And that flexibility is really nice. If you use a third-party system, obviously you can integrate that. There's the Concur connector that kind of sits and kind of brokers all of those conversations.
So you don't have to be an SAP S4 or EC payroll customer. If you have any product, it can integrate, but obviously the tighter integration with SAP's family of products.
David Szymanski
Interesting. And then speaking just more from a functional perspective, to add to that, those cost objects that you're referring to, those are all customizable fields within Concur, and those are all configurational things. And you can have those as required, you can have those as optional fields, drop down values.
There's just an immense amount of custom fields that integrates with that too, as well. And then another question came in just a few seconds ago, is this customer, they're upgrading to S4 and they want to know when can they do the Concur piece with their upgrade to S4?
Jeremy Amos
Yeah. So this is a little bit of the delicate dance of coordinating your roadmap and figuring out how things fit together. Ultimately, Concur is a relatively flexible tool, meaning that you can kind of place it where you'd like.
So if you want to do it before your project, you want to do it after your project, you want to do it during your project, all of those things work. There's really not any particular criticality around timing, because it can stand alone. One thing I would just advise folks is taking on too many things at once.
So if you are going to go live with S4, and you are going live with Concur, you probably want to try to time that go live relatively close together. Because what you don't want to do is train up all your workers on one process and one set of accounting objects and things like that, just to have them have to flip a week later or a month later. So think about that from a user perspective.
So if you can kind of peg those together, that's great. But if you're just starting your journey and your journey is maybe like a year and a half long, the Concur implementation is significantly shorter, you could get value from Concur right away. And then that transition, when you bring up S4, is going to be relatively smooth.
But again, just think about the change impacts on your user. That's really the biggest decision process rather than a technical one, at least in my opinion.
David Szymanski
No, very well said. I like what you said about that, because it's true. You want the user experience to be a pleasant one, and you want the buy-in to be pleasant and good.
So it's a matter of when you do it, how you do it, and it all integrates. So very good point, Jeremy. Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Jeremy Amos
And WalkMe is available as well for Concur, and that's huge in terms of managing the experience. And so the exercise of how you submit an expense report, how you get an advance or something like that, all of those processes will stay intact, regardless of what platform you're on. And WalkMe helps guide the user along the way.
David Szymanski
It certainly does, yes. It looks like that was the questions that we had, and hopefully we gave you some good insight and some good answers with that. And Jeremy and Kareem, I want to just say thank you.
Thank you for taking the time to be our experts and discussions with us. Thank you, everyone, for spending some time with us today. And we hope we gave you a little clearer look how SAP Concur can make life a little bit easier for utility companies, especially when it comes to handling the receipts.
We talked a lot about the receipts and the mileage and the compliance, so hopefully that made a little bit insightful. And then I wanted to say on behalf of Phoenix Business Consulting, we're here to support you. Any questions you may have, or if you want to discuss your organization needs, just reach out and don't hesitate to reach out.
And truly, thank you for your time today. And if you have any questions, please reach out. And then this QR code that you see on the screen to the right, if you could just take a snapshot of that, and it's just a survey.
If you want to take that survey, it takes a couple of minutes to do, and your feedback is always welcome. So thanks again, everyone. Thanks for the time, and I hope you enjoyed the webinar.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.
Anthony Jimenez
Utilities power our homes and businesses — but travel and expense management powers the crews who make it all possible.
From storm response to major capital projects, modernizing T&E isn’t just about paperwork — it’s about resilience, compliance, and control.
A big thank you to Jeremy Amos and Corina Sanchez for joining us, and to you, our listeners, for tuning in.
This podcast was created in partnership with Carahsoft Technology Corporation. Carahsoft offers expertise in Federal, State and Local Government and Education with IT products, services and training through our partners and procurement contracts. For more information, contact us at Concur@carahsoft.com
Until next time — stay resilient, stay connected, and keep driving automation forward.