IFFCO is a privately held multinational company that is active in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector that also has some beauty business and is active in packaging and transportation. The company has its headquarters in Dubai, UAE and has operations in 50+ countries on five continents. The company has more than fifteen thousand employees.
Due to its distributed nature and also multiple ERP systems in the back end, IFFCO – and in particular also IFFCO’s employees – suffered from slow, inconsistent and regularly manual expense management process. This also caused a policy adherence and compliance problem, as reporting was virtually impossible. Only two countries used an Intranet based digital process that still was cumbersome due to the company’s matrix organization. “It was completely manual process. So just imagine that someone from the one category of the businesses has some marketing spend in Indonesia. Line manager sometimes is not aware because it's a matrix reporting. They need to exchange multiple emails between the Indonesia then the finance and the potential marketing from UAE to get this approval and that you can proceed and claim this expense. So, it was very inefficient process. It could take between two to three weeks to get this something approved.”
So, there was very clearly a need for a streamlined solution that could be rolled out globally and that ultimately could cover travel, expenses, and petty cash transactions.
Here you can watch the full conversation with Jarek.
IFFCO ultimately chose Zoho Expense because of its easy-to-use user interface, its adaptability and ability to integrate into the company’s backend systems and Zoho’s motivation to involve itself. With IFFCO being an early enterprise customer, Zoho showed a strong interest in making the project successful.
The initial implementation with a focus on travel and employee expenses happened in the UAE and took around three months. It was followed by a six-month roll-out into the other countries. Due to their higher complexity, petty cash processes were added at a later stage.
The whole process was supported by formulating a new expense management policy that, with some localization, is applicable worldwide. It was a cross-functional project with involvement of HR, finance, and IT. As a rare positive of the pandemic, Covid 19 became an unexpected catalyst for the rollout. It accelerated adoption, facilitated a natural transition to digital processes, and provided a smoother initial implementation phase due to reduced travel volumes.
Overall, the implementation process went pretty smooth. The main challenges were less of technical nature but rather the change management itself plus data accuracy. According to Jarek, “Now the rollout was not the technical challenge; it was change management challenge because at the same time we were introducing the new policy, which sometimes had to be localized.”
Still, some technical challenges, mainly on the interface side, needed to be overcome as well. “We had a bit of hiccups at the beginning with the interfaces to the ERP whenever we are talking about the mainly sending the Pos[ition] for through the creation of the Pos[ition] and then sending this information to the travel agency but yeah after some time we stabilized it and the inter vendor and inter SI cooperation worked smooth as well”.
However, the main hurdle was and is an operational one: data accuracy in the HR system, as the expense system depends on it. Jarek maintains that “the biggest challenge even which we are facing today is to keep the data updated in the in the primary HR system so if the people are for example shifting between or they are changing the grade whatever is happening with them it should reflect in SuccessFactors as quickly as possible because if Zoho doesn't know this because it's not entered anywhere then the people used to come okay it went for the approval to the to the wrong person.”
But what about outcomes?
Implementing a central expense tool led to significant time and effort savings due to a high degree of automation. The effort went down from half an hour to about two minutes while the collection schedule of the shared service went away totally. “Now just to understand also the benefits even for UAE the people used to for example I'm getting back from the travel. I take my bills; I scan one by one; I'm sending them to my mailbox. Then I need to open the new folder. I need to save each of them and renaming at that point of time from the scan to specific bill, I don't know, taxi, food, whatever. Then I had to open this expense. I had to itemize my expenses, attaching the right expenses, the right attachments, print the report after submission, clap all this together, and put that into the cabinet. And every two weeks, the shared services used to collect that, and only then the reimbursement was happening. Nowadays the people used to travel, they’re taking the photos on the spot on the go when they are in travel, and when they reach the, you know, the home location, they just mark this, this, this, this against this trip. Thank you. So, you do everything in an electronic format. So, reduction even for the business expense got from half an hour to two minutes.”
This results in much faster reimbursements with its obvious impact on employee satisfaction, which is something that Jarek is quite passionate about. “So, this is the massive benefit, and we have to also keep in mind that when the people used to spend their own money, we are not holding them right now for two weeks or something like that. When they claim and it's approved, then everything afterwards happens automatically. The booking in the downstream system happens automatically. The request for to the bank for the payment reimbursement happens automatically. When the confirmation of the reimbursement comes to the one of our ERPs, we are also sending this information back to Zoho. So, the people who are claiming, they don't have to be users in one of those ERPs. They use Expense, and they have a full visibility [of] what's happening.”
In addition, there is better compliance “obviously when you don't have that in a digital format, how you can ensure that the policy is deployed, how that the particular country is compliant”.
The necessary harmonization of the spend categories brought better data visibility into the process. Spend categories are held in Zoho Expense, which also reduces the complexity of the ERP interfaces. This, quite naturally, led to the use of Zoho Analytics, which helps in identifying spending patterns.
The success of the project has brought it considerable internal recognition. “Zoho Expense has been, this implementation was cross functional effort between the HR, finance, it was the project which was identified as the biggest innovation delivered in 21/22, I think for IFFCO group as general”.
Key takeaways
IFFCOs transition from a manual to a globally harmonized process with Zoho Expense resulted in a significantly reduced user effort and a dramatically reduced overall processing time.
The user-friendly system and automated processes that allow for easy compliance and fast reimbursements should have a positive impact on employee satisfaction and it improves productivity.
Implementing Zoho Expense increased IFFCOs ability to deploy and enforce company-wide expense policies while the digital process enables better monitoring and control of expenses for all parties.
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