Automation for Digitising Travel and Expense Management
A case study about how automation helped V-Guard to make its travel expense management more efficient
V-Guard is one of India’s leading electrical & electronic manufacturing companies. Over the past four decades, it has firmly positioned itself as a consumer-focused conglomerate, in the process becoming a common household name across the country. In these years, V-Guard has revamped its product lines and reimagined its internal processes, using new-age tech to increase its competitive edge in the market.
For a growing organisation, company policies,
reimbursement forms and manual claims create a bottomless void that drains company time and money. It was crucial for V-Guard to embrace new age tech and maximise efficiency.
Key Expense Management Challenges for V-Guard
The major operational challenges that were hindering V-Guard’s progress, and therefore needed to be addressed immediately, were:
WITH HAPPAY, COMPLIANCE HAS IMPROVED AND 95% OF TE REPORTS ARE FILED WITIN THE SAME MONTH — Jayshankar N, AGM, Finance, V-Guard
IT’S NO LONGER A CUMBERSOME PROCESS FOR THE EMPLOYEES TO REQUEST FOR MONEY — Diane Tito, HR Officer, V-Guard WITH OUR COMPREHENSIVE DASHBOARD, V-GUARD WAS ABLE TO ACHIEVE COMPLETE VISIBILITY AND CONTROL OVER SPENDING AND ALSO BOOST PROCESS EFFICIENCY FROM END TO END — Varun Rathi, COO and Co-Founder, Happay
• Long fund procurement cycle: With employees distributed across the country, the time taken for procurement of funds was 20 days. There was an immediate need to cut down the time.
• Manual filing and follow-ups: With the company’s headquarters located in Kochi, employees from all over the country were required to courier reimbursement forms to the HO for approvals. This process was timeconsuming and laborious for managers and executives alike.
• Policy violations: As V-Guard scaled up, policy violations increased as well. Reports were manually processed, making it unsustainable for the finance team to ensure timely and compliant approvals.
• Lack of expense visibility: A majority of the expenses were marked off as ‘others’, leading to considerable confusion. Far deeper visibility into these expenses was required to ensure permitted use of company finances.
The Happay Solution
Happay played a very crucial role in automating the entire expense management process. The automation drive started in Kochi and extended to all V-Guard offices across India.
Happay developed a customisable solution for V-Guard by configuring employee grades, cities and even city types. Policies were then framed catering to the company’s managerial hierarchy. The final solution was integrated with the firm’s accounting software, which also enabled V-Guard to migrate to a file-based format of recording transactions.
Given the primary concerns raised by the V-Guard team, Happay was initially introduced to a small set of users to analyse the impact on operational efficiency. However, the dedication of Happay team towards slowly integrating our solution into the company’s operations helped us gain trust, and we were soon introduced the solution to employees across the country.
The result
The results of V-Guard’s process transformation aimed at corporate expense automation can be summarised as follows: • Increased control over corporate expenses • Enhanced regulatory compliance • End to end automation, making for massively reduced claim cycle time • Instantaneous fund transfers • Complete digitisation, security & scalability
Happay reduced the overall costs and also established an easy process which translated to be the backbone of the organization. The process for claiming reimbursements reduced from 45 days to 5 days.
We would like to inform our readers that in our last issue, by mistake the company name against both Diane and Jaishnkar was wrongly mmentioned. They both are VGuard employees, not of Happay.