In 2004, AstraZeneca was working with multiple card providers and had no standard expense management system. Consequently, the company required a high number of full-time equivalent resources to manage travel and expenses (T&E) and suffered from a lack of visibility. In addition, AstraZeneca’s compliance tracking was weak and its supplier usage tracking was limited. The company decided it needed a single T&E card programme across the 15 European countries financed out of its regional hub plus the UK and Switzerland.
Citi was appointed in 2005 to implement a T&E card programme to meet AstraZeneca’s goals of reducing costs through increased transactional efficiency, the elimination of local resource requirements, improving rebates and enhancing compliance and the tracking of benefits. Full implementation occurred in four phases. Firstly, Citi became the sole card provider, significantly lowering costs. Secondly, AstraZeneca migrated from individually-billed programmes to a centrally-billed programme. This reduced the time spent on expenses by its highly-skilled work force, ensured timely payment, maximised rebates, and increased control over reconciliation of credit card spend versus approved expenses.
In 2009, the third phase was implemented; a standard expense management system and weekly transaction files from Citi were integrated. These were mapped to a single standard file, allowing automated population of expenses into both expense and finance systems, with a consequent increase in spending visibility through global reporting. These phases were implemented in three years and delivered the expected results. The fourth, and most important phase of the programme was optimisation. AstraZeneca switched to direct debit payments to remove the need for manual payment processing each month and reduce the risk of late payment charges.
“It’s great to see that collaborative ways of working can make a real difference for AstraZeneca. I’m delighted that multiple teams with energy and drive have been recognised for reaching best in class.”
Administration of the programme was centralised and standardised in Manchester, UK, having been previously handled by programme administrators in each country. At the same time, key controls were implemented. In addition, analysis of each country’s spend and expenses was undertaken and where key performance indicators revealed a problem in individual countries, such as high levels of out-of-pocket spend highlighting a lack of compliance – these were addressed.
Caroline Strachan explains “AstraZeneca now has a best-in-class T&E card programme which spans multiple countries and continues to grow, with the plan of implementing additional countries in 2010 such as Greece, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.”
The card programme is fully integrated into the company’s travel management company and expense management system, and is sufficiently streamlined to a low cost provider. The solution provides improved, consistent management information to help identify category management value opportunities and deliver line of sight of T&E expenses back to budgets. It has resulted in substantially reduced T&E card operating costs and has also improved the level of rebates received. The visibility and control afforded by the T&E programme has given AstraZeneca improved financial transactional efficiency and management as well as enhanced compliance and tracking of benefits relating to preferred suppliers. Moreover, it has improved employee satisfaction and productivity.
As Strachan observes: “The success of AstraZeneca’s T&E card programme is a result of open and honest dialogue between multiple teams at Citi and AstraZeneca. Citi’s account management, customer service, technology and other teams worked in close partnership with AstraZeneca’s treasury, transactional finance and Procurement teams.”
