Nitor Infotech helped one of its customers in implementing enterprise class Travel Requisition and Expense Management process using Microsoft SharePoint and Nintex platforms. With Nitor’s well-defined travel management solution, the customer is able to have:

	Single process to handle everything - from raising travel request to claiming expenses
	Workflow-centric application to allow view, modification and tracking of data from time to time
	Paper-less approvals which reduce paperwork
	Automatic application of corporate policies which relieve employees from policy-based forms ( allowances etc)
	Ability to track processes, understand bottlenecks and improve process performance

When an employee travels for business purpose, he/she has to go through a series of approval processes right from raising the travel request to getting advances/credits. Post the travel, the employee also needs to settle the expenses. The overall process is mostly paper-based and involves multiple approvals. Manual approval is a tedious and time taking process which is an indirect cost to the company as the employee spends quality time in these tasks. Most of the travel preparations such as travel booking and advances happen over emails, phone calls or personal visits to various departments.These again are very time consuming tasks. Because of lack of digitalization, too many applications and touch points are created which decrease the efficiency of overall process.

Post the travel, the employee has to fill in expense form, calculate expenses based on grade and policies and submit the application with actual bills. Many a times, the employees are not completely aware of many travel policies and so they end up spending more time in completing the process. Add to that the compliance to be met from account and finance side such as adding correct GL codes etc. which make the process even more complicated.

Overall, the process becomes tedious, time taking and involves too many follow ups. Also since no data points are captured, the stakeholders cannot analyze and improve the process.

Nitor defined a well-defined travel and expense management solution. This solution creates a one stop application where employees can raise travel requests, get approvals without leaving their desks and get notifications on advance collection. After the travel, the employee can pick the same thread and start the settlement process. Such one stop solution saves time, reduces paper work and creates data points that can help in improvement of process from time to time.

	Organized Workflow: With this solution, any employee can raise a travel request right from his desk. Based on the reporting hierarchy, the request is sent for approval. Once the travel is approved by respective managers, the employee can see advance collection notification. On the settlement side too, employee can access and complete settlement process. It thus completely saves time away from desks and approval follow ups.
	Alerts and Tasks: System generated alerts and tasks make it simple for all the approvers to look at the request sand applications. With automatic reminders, nobody needs to remember the tasks and at the same time, the tasks get completed on time.
	Flexibility: Based on hierarchy and policies, there is a provision to change the process configuration.There is also flexibility to change the processes in future.
	Reduced paper work withautomated data capture: The solution is driven through electronic forms and all the data is captured in the database automatically. With access to all the data electronically, the stakeholders can anytime have a look at it for improving the efficiency.

The solution is based on SharePoint Server 2010 platform and powered by Nintex-2010 Workflow engine. The solution also follows all the user policies defined in Active Directory.