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Graham Construction Digitizes Travel Expense Business Process

Graham Construction, a large construction company, implemented a new mobile expense reporting system to replace their outdated paper-based process. The new system allows employees to submit travel expenses in real-time using smartphones, eliminating paperwork and speeding up reimbursement. This saves the company time and money compared to the previous process which required employees to manually submit receipts after trips.

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NOURDINE EZZALMADI
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66 views2 pages

Graham Construction Digitizes Travel Expense Business Process

Graham Construction, a large construction company, implemented a new mobile expense reporting system to replace their outdated paper-based process. The new system allows employees to submit travel expenses in real-time using smartphones, eliminating paperwork and speeding up reimbursement. This saves the company time and money compared to the previous process which required employees to manually submit receipts after trips.

Uploaded by

NOURDINE EZZALMADI
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Graham Construction Digitizes Travel Expense Business Process

With 13 offices and over 1,700 employees in Canada and the United States, Graham Construction
is one of the largest construction companies in North America. The company is headquartered in
Calgary and has been in business for more than 90 years.
Graham’s involvement in construction projects consists of the preparation of building sites and
construction of city public infrastructure. For example, in one of Graham’s recently awarded
projects, the company will be in charge of the demolition work, excavation, shoring and
dewatering, and the construction of sidewalks and street lighting. The project is part of the
construction of a residential community in downtown Richmond, B.C., and Graham’s work is
estimated to cost $267 million.
With hundreds of these projects on the go, Graham’s success relies on the control of project
expenses. In order to make these projects manageable and within budget, projects are broken
down into hundreds of project elements that need to be closely monitored and controlled. Along
with traditional building project costs such as building materials and machinery use, construction
projects also require the work of engineers and other field work employees who need to visit the
construction site regularly. After each visit, engineers need to submit all the expenses that they
incurred in such visits, including travel costs (car, gas), accommodation costs (hotel), and per diem
costs (food). By the end of a project, the cost of these travel expenses can add up to tens of
thousands of dollars per project and therefore require close monitoring and control. However,
unprecedented company growth and changes in regulations left Graham’s old employee expense
reporting process obsolete.
The previous system was user, approver, and workflowunfriendly, and many expenses were
inaccurately coded and many of them were not attributed to the right building project. For
example, travel expenses incurred by an engineer in the construction of a new office building
were coded for the construction of a school building. Part of the problem was that employees
could not report expenses right away but had to store receipts, save them, and then do the job
when they got back to their offices, the next day, and often even weeks later. One employee
could easily employ over an hour to complete the paperwork necessary to report a travel expense
to a building site, which would include photocopying meal receipts, gas receipts, hotel invoices,
filling out and printing forms, putting all documents into an envelope, and addressing it to the
right location. Once the administrative staff received the claim, they would have to acknowledge
the receipt by mail and input the expense into the expense reporting system. If any information
or document was missing, the complete expense would be returned to the employee to resubmit.
The whole process was very manual.
The company had estimated that processing low-value purchases could cost about $200 by the
time it ran from end to end. Often managers needed to spend lots of extra time reconciling
budgets and investigating expenses for which they were not responsible. In addition, the process
of approving expenses was not built with the controls that the company desired and regulation
requires. These all meant that the employee expense reporting business process needed to be
replaced with something better that would not require employees to be tied to a desk entering
expenses, and that allows employees to enter and submit expenses on the go, right from a job
site or as soon as an expense is incurred.
The solution came in the form of a new information system that allows front line employees to
report expenses on the go using their smartphones whenever and wherever they are. The new
system allows for faster reimbursements, less time-consuming reporting and a mobile, paperless
process; expenses are now being submitted on time with more consistency, with accurate coding
and large savings. With the new expense system, low volume purchases are now put on
purchasing cards, which are processed immediately with no paperwork involved and even
offering a rebate. That way employees can spend more time doing what they are good at doing
and like to do rather than inputting expenses and managing paperwork to trace expenses.

Questions
1. Describe the steps of a typical employee travel expense reporting business process and identify
which steps are automated by the use of information technology.
2. Describe the advantages of the new expense reporting business process over the previous one.

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