Photo of Sophie Polednik of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Christoph Guettinger and Brenda Connell of Worley Parsons collecting the Award on behalf of Simon Holt.

This programme, which will incorporate over 4,500 cards with over $400m in cardable spend per annum, is set to cover over 40 countries in Asia Pacific, EMEA, Canada, the United States and South America. The company selected the solution provided by its bank on the basis of the bank’s technology platform, global footprint and the ability to get information into the company’s Global Reporting and Account Management (GRAM) portal.

The challenge

The company’s extensive and expanding global footprint had resulted in fragmented, decentralised and disparate travel and expenses (T&E) and procurement processes.

“We didn’t have access to all our information as quickly as we would like” says Simon Holt, the company’s CFO. “We wanted to be able to start asking questions about how we could improve not only our T&E spend but also our procurement spend.”

The first step was to stop people from implementing their own local card programmes and to recognise the value of a global solution that would support information to the business as well as the integration of back office processes. “For us it wasn’t just about implementing a T&E programme, which some of the locations were trying to do,” says Holt. “We saw the value of adopting a more cost-efficient way of doing business by using a card programme that would include procurement. We knew that if we got this right we could not only reduce costs by consolidation but also reduce costs in our back office processes.”

The solution

Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) initially presented WorleyParsons with a comprehensive accounts payable proposition, highlighting the benefits of implementing a global corporate T&E and procurement card programme. “This led to the bank doing some more extensive analysis on our existing accounts payable file, including performing vendor analysis as to which payments were ‘cardable’,” says Holt. This outlined to WorleyParsons the enormous opportunity it had in optimising its procure-to-pay process and gaining benefits from card payments.

WorleyParsons selected the solution provided by BofAML on the basis of the bank’s technology platform, global footprint and the ability to get information into the company’s Global reporting and Account Management (GRAM) portal.

The solution includes local currency cards across many of the company’s operating countries. A cross-border USD card is also being implemented to support WorleyParsons’ other locations.

Where procurement is concerned, the solution includes leveraging cards as a payment method and using the bank’s innovative virtual card solutions in North America, Europe and Asia. The solution also provides full integration with the company’s expense management system.

Best practice and innovation

The programme, which will incorporate over 4,500 cards with over $400m in cardable spend per annum, is set to cover over 40 countries in Asia Pacific, EMEA, Canada, the United States and South America. As well as implementing best practice card processes at a global level, WorleyParsons has looked beyond the typical parameters of a card programme and identified further opportunities to benefit the company. “We’ve embraced card payments not only for our traditional T&E, but also for our global procurement spend,” says Holt. “This is where we see the real value of the solution.”

Holt expects that over time 100,000 corporate procurement invoices will be replaced by the card solution, resulting in additional cost benefits. By providing a convenient, easy-to-use card they will also continue the drive for improved compliance to their procurement policy.