How Bemol Revolutionized Expense Management with SAP Concur
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Key Takeaways
⇨ Bemol's partnership with SAP Concur transformed its corporate travel and expense management by automating processes, increasing efficiency, and providing better financial visibility, showcasing the importance of adopting technology for business growth.
⇨ The implementation of SAP Concur enabled Bemol to standardize approval workflows across departments, enhancing transparency and facilitating faster, informed decision-making, thereby demonstrating the value of integrated systems in modern organizations.
⇨ Bemol's success illustrates that effective expense management is a strategic priority that directly supports sustainability and expansion goals, emphasizing the need for businesses to modernize their operations for better decision-making and scalability.
Growth is a great problem to have until the cracks begin to show in an organization’s processes. Brazilian retail giant Bemol can attest to this, as the 80-year-old company faced an overcame a modern challenge: taming the beast of corporate expense management.
According to SAP Brazil, Bemol’s growth, which included 37 stores, a robust online operation, and a diverse portfolio, was creating a drag on efficiency. The company now faced a critical turning point: how could it maintain agility and efficiency while expanding. The answer for Bemol was a strategic alliance with technology, specifically SAP Concur. SAP Brazil indicated that by implementing SAP’s corporate travel and expense management solution, Bemol updated its processes and transformed its entire financial control structure. Moreover, this move from manual, siloed operations to an automated, integrated system marked a significant leap forward for the company.
Transformation in Practice
Upon implementing SAP Concur, Bemol’s expense management team could automate expense reporting, which freed up valuable time and resources. However, the benefits also included gaining unprecedented visibility into its financial data that allowed for faster and more informed decision-making. Additionally, the standardization of approval workflows across departments brought a new level of transparency and efficiency. Afonso Castro, Bemol’s Backoffice Tech Lead, noted, “We’re always on the lookout for technologies that make our processes more agile and organized. With SAP Concur, we’re advancing in digitalization and management, reducing waste and optimizing resources across all areas of the company.”
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An Award-Winning Initiative
Bemol’s innovative use of SAP Concur was also recognized with the “Excellence in Expansion and Optimization Award” at the SAP Concur Customer Excellence Awards 2024. According to Denis Tassitano, Vice President of SAP Concur LAC, “It’s inspiring to see a company like Bemol, with such a storied history and regional impact, strategically use technology to grow gradually and sustainably.” Bemol’s journey offers a powerful lesson for businesses of all sizes on how leveraging the right technology can turn legacy into leadership.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
For SAPinsiders, Bemol’s success with SAP Concur is a reflection of broader market shifts and a guide to unlocking greater value from the SAP ecosystem:
- Embrace AI-driven automation to enhance, not just control. Recent SAPinsider research highlights that while cost control remains a priority, the strategic focus is shifting towards using AI and automation to improve the employee experience and free up finance teams for more analytical tasks. As seen in Bemol’s case, the goal was to become more agile and organized by reducing manual work. SAPinsiders should leverage SAP Concur’s AI capabilities to automate approvals, detect anomalies, and simplify policy compliance, allowing your team to focus on the strategic insights that data provides, rather than just the data entry.
- View SAP Concur as an extensible platform. The power of SAP Concur lies in its open ecosystem. In fact, the SAP Concur App Center, with over 250 partner integrations, demonstrates that the platform is designed to be the hub of the T&E ecosystem, not an isolated silo. Through open APIs, organizations can build solutions that seamlessly connect ERP, HR, payroll, and duty-of-care systems directly into the Concur workflow. This creates a single source of truth for spend data and allows SAPinsiders to plug in specialized applications and create a tailored solution that meets unique business needs, much like how Bemol integrated the tool to gain unified visibility.
- Tie expense management directly to strategic business Outcomes. The most critical lesson that organizations can learn from Bemol is that modernizing expense management is a strategic initiative. The company’s implementation was directly linked to its high-level sustainability and expansion goals. It optimized processes and enabled growth. This reframes the investment case for SAPinsiders as the true ROI of a solution like SAP Concur lies in the speed of decision-making, the transparency of financial operations, and the ability to scale the business without being bogged down by legacy processes.
