Tracking expenses from several thousand employees in two hundred markets across six continents can be a nightmare. Its even worse if you use multiple financial procurement systems to track all this information. Ford Motor Company faces this quagmire of expense reports every day.
The worlds second largest automaker turned to the Captura Expense Engine from Bothell, Washington-headquartered Captura to address this problem and bring expenses under tighter control. Ford has been using Captura Expense to automate the travel expense process throughout our organization, and we recognize the potential of Capturas technology to automate other business processes, including e-procurement, purchasing, and online exchange transactions, said Jim Yost, Chief Information Officer at Ford.
However, Ford did not stop at the travel expense management system. Instead, they decided to ante up a few million bucks to help Captura develop the Expense Engine even further. Aimed at medium and large businesses, the Captura Expense Engine will be a major advancement toward solving a complex process in capturing, validating, reconciling, integrating, and analyzing global expense transactions, according to Dan Vetras, CEO and President of Captura. It promises to be an integrated solution to problems created by use of multiple financial systems, he added.
Ford is inclined to agree. Through our investment in Captura, were supporting an innovative technology that can integrate all transactions into a single expense management system to help us make more intelligent spending decisions, said Yost.
The end goal is to provide a unified system that places all corporate expenses and e-business transactions into a single data repository online, regardless of purchase type or vehicle. With a unified system in place, Ford feels that management will be empowered to make better decisions about the use of company resources.
Captura Expense Engine can bring quantifiable savings for mid-size and large companies. It can help reduce processing costs for invoices, expense reports and purchase orders from an average of more than $80 per transaction to $2-4, says Vetras. Its possible to save even more by leveraging the expense data to negotiate better deals with vendors. Employees and suppliers will like the fact that it can reduce expense reimbursement time drastically. Vetras claims the engine should be able to reduce that turnaround from thirty days to as little as 24 hours.
In the last year, Captura also partnered with Citibank to provide General Motors with a better charge card management system for the more than 120,000 card users. Under the new system, GM predicts a savings of $3.7 million per year in the North American operations alone. With potential savings like these, its no wonder the worlds two largest automakers have turned to Captura.
