Automating the expense management process for increased employee satisfaction, efficiency & organisational transparency
“Practise what you preach” is not just a catch phrase at Ricoh, it’s a way of life. As a global tech company that specialises in business services, imaging equipment, production print solutions, document management solutions and IT services, Ricoh has been delivering innovative solutions to customers for over 80 years. In this journey to empower digital workplaces, Ricoh looked at its own processes to improve workplace productivity, efficiency & employee satisfaction.
Expense management, for most organisations, is a manual, labour-intensive and notoriously time-consuming task. Ricoh’s own expense management system was no exception. Managing receipts, spreadsheets, reports and submissions for management approval, which at times included multiple leaders, was all done in a paper-based system that was prone to errors and delays. Not only did this manual process cause significant bottlenecks within the workflow, but it also had a ripple effect on the Finance department’s monthly & quarterly reconciliation process. Management didn’t have line of sight into the approval process and were unable to see the status of an expense reimbursement and the inefficient process caused further angst among employees, sometimes waiting for a month or more before seeing their expenses reimbursed
Ricoh implemented a solution often recommended to clients: The Ricoh Expense Management (REX) system, a web-based, cloud-enabled, ERP-integrated solution that streamlines the entire expense submission and approval lifecycle. Every manual step within the expense management workflow is now automated and simplified with increased transparency from start to finish, resulting in a single streamlined, automated workflow. Today, Ricoh’s Accounts Payable team can process over a thousand expense reports monthly and has experienced almost a 50% reduction in time and work effort to process these reports.
The REX implementation brought measurable results to the Accounts Payable team and benefits to all Ricoh employees:
- 30 percent reduction in courier costs and significantly lowered printing costs
- Expenses are processed more quickly, easily and with fewer errors than before
- Mobile workers can now submit expenses and attach receipts from any location and receive automated notifications at every step of the approvals process
- Managers have increased visibility into the entire process
- The Finance department has easy access to saved records for reporting purposes
- Real-time cost data allows decision makers to manage overall business expenses
- Employees can focus on more productive and strategic aspects of their roles
- Increased opportunities for ongoing streamlining and optimisation of other workflows that relate to the expense management process
We, at Ricoh, consider ourselves to be a Change Maker and are passionate about helping others become one too.
Watch this video to hear more about how automating a simple line-of-business process such as expense management can positively impact your organisation’s workplace productivity and enhance employee satisfaction.
