Discovering the Current Market Point of View

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to assess current market perspective, including trends, customer needs, and challenges.

How Work Is Changing

Remote Work

The nature of work is changing; employees who were traditionally office-based are now taking advantage of remote working policies. Their expectation is to have the business tools to help them do their job efficiently, no matter where they're working from. This shift in work culture has similarly redefined business travel, adapting it to meet the flexibility and efficiency that today’s workforce values.

Woman sat at her dining table with her laptop and cup of coffee in her hands. A black dog sits on an leather sofa behind her.

Organizations know that keeping a tighter control on travel and expenses can have a dramatic effect on profitability. However, business travel encourages closer customer relationships and promotes collaboration. Organizations strive to balance these things: fostering strong customer and colleague engagement, providing employee access to tools to maximize productivity, and managing employee-initiated spend.

SAP Concur solutions help customers address this challenge by giving organizations complete visibility and control of employee spend, no matter where it happens. This gives employees the ability to create and submit expense reports accurately, quickly, and simply.

Sustainability

Today, the usual way of doing business doesn't meet the needs of employees, customers, or stakeholders anymore. Expectations have changed. Just offering a paycheck isn't enough to attract and keep the best talent. Employees now look for workplaces that care about safety, fairness, and flexibility, helping them balance work and life meaningfully.

Making a profit is still important, but it's not the only thing that matters. People, including employees, investors, and customers, are interested in how responsibly a company operates. They want to see that companies are doing good for people and the environment, not just making money. They also look for proof of these good practices.

Shadow of an airplane over a green forest canopy.

Because of this, leaders in all industries are focusing more on corporate sustainability. They are making it a key strategy for the company's long-term success and growth, rather than just a public relations move.

SAP Concur solutions help customers to guide their organization toward more sustainable travel. The solutions give travelers information to make more responsible decisions such as booking rail over a flight or selecting a hotel with high sustainability credentials. Reporting within our solutions allows organizations to record, analyze, and offset carbon emissions.

AI

Conversations and the news have focused on advances in generative AI and the large language models that generate prose, conduct conversations, and are built upon massive amounts of internet data. Users are excited by the possibilities of improving everything from emails to sales presentations to medical care.

A man and a woman standing in front of a large futuristic screen. They are selecting icons on the screen. The man is holding a laptop

At SAP Concur, we’re excited about the transformative possibilities of AI, but AI isn’t news to us–we’ve been working with it for years. For nearly a decade, we have been infusing AI and machine learning into business solutions like ExpenseIt and Verify. For SAP Concur, technology is part of a commitment to innovation and meeting and anticipating business needs:

  • The need for efficiencies amid tight budgets, a shortage of qualified employees, and as we just saw, the shift to hybrid work.
  • The need for greater insights and timelier decisions amid ever-competitive markets.
  • The need to be resilient and ready for change amidst global instability and other uncertainties.

Key Trends in Travel and Spend Management

In 2023, SAP Concur partnered with Forrester Consulting to evaluate current Travel and Expense (T&E) challenges and the benefits of intelligent T&E solutions for businesses of all sizes. According to this study, 64% of respondents reported that their companies are under pressure to manage business costs and optimize resources more effectively. Watch the following video to learn more.

Review the report in full here: 2023 Forrester Report - Empower the Future of Work with Intelligent Travel and Expense Solutions May 2023.

Key Business Challenges

The most common challenges our customers face are:

Finance and Compliance

  • Lack of visibility and control of spending
  • Slow financial processing, posting, and payments
  • Increased end-to-end costs
  • Productivity loss
  • Prone to compliance issues

Deployment and User Experience

  • Unreliable network security
  • Difficulty integrating with current applications
  • Lengthy setup, implementation, and maintenance
  • Disparate data sources across the system landscape
  • Poor user experience
  • Lack of mobile tools

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