Travelling supports sustainability? Possible.

When you think about sustainability, I am convinced that greenhouse gases, sustainable usage of resources and environmental protection come to your mind.

But what about the world of travel booking, business expense processing, employee reimbursement and international work compliance? Probably not.

Sustainability has many facets – as reflected in the program called DEGREE that Siemens launched - and so do the elements that contribute to it. While these elements mentioned above might seem far away from sustainability, they are important drivers to a sustainable future: for people, businesses and our own organization.

From 100 policies to one tap on the app

The decision was made to change the entire travel and expense process from start to finish – ensuring an end-to-end experience. The goal was one seamless digital solution for managing travel, business expenses and related employee allowances – reducing complexity, bureaucracy, and paper. Now at the end of our global rollout the project team, Supply Chain Management, IT, Accounting and Siemens Global Business Services (GBS), finished the global implementation for Siemens and external customers of GBS! Today, we are live with the End-to-End Travel & Expense solution in 50 countries and more than 260,000 individuals can book their travel, claim their business expenses, and have their allowances processed through SAP Concur. All of this with the guiding principle of ‘anytime, anywhere and from any device’.

A Culture of Ownership and Trust is on the Rise!

For a large part of the “Siemens world”, the age of sending paper receipts back and forth is history. So is bureaucracy and complexity in this process. It provides greater transparency of travel, related business expenses and allowances and enable fast and smart decisions by employees without asking leaders to ‘micro-manage’. We foster an ownership mindset through eliminating multiple approval layers and creating transparency of travel and business expenses for users and leaders. Equally important is the creation of a trust culture. In some countries the requirement for “receipts” of varying small values is no longer required by tax authorities, which means, we no longer require employees to submit those receipts – trusting the legitimacy of their claims and immediately eliminating the use of paper.

While this may sound rather simple, it is not – especially if you know, that we started with hundreds of tools and policies for Travel & Expense at Siemens globally. Given our culture of trust, as governments move away from requiring receipts as evidence of the expense (for smaller values), we too are eliminating that requirement of our employees.

Since the launch of the initiative, Siemens GBS internal and external customers have already contributed to the elimination of around 10 Mio. paper-based receipts generation and storage – which roughly translates into savings of…

• 84,000+ liters of water
• 130+ barrels of oil
• ~1,000 trees

And to end with a “daily” and potentially more tangible comparison: Do you know, how many glasses of water you could drink with the saved amount of water? Around 336.000!

Turning sustainability into culture

This global initiative was about much more than saving costs associated with the administrative processing and IT tools associated with T&E - it was about helping our customers shift to a Culture of Ownership & Trust, streamlining and standardizing processes, improving the user experience, and finally ensuring that Sustainability is not only embedded in Siemens own products and technology but also in our own operations. Because, every #DEGREE counts!

An award for innovation

Our approach to digitalization, policy and process standardization and significant shift to a culture of Ownership and Trust did not only play an important role in the contribution to sustainability but as well lead to winning the SAP Concur Innovation Award 2021!

“Every year at SAP Concur Fusion we take the time to recognize customers who exemplify innovation and use SAP Concur solutions to help them focus on being best run” (SAP Concur Newsroom).

With our partners from SCM, Thorsten Eicke and Katharina Gawalek, I got the chance to share more about our journey in this video

More Information on GBS and HR-Services here.