From chaotic to cohesive: How Weatherford transformed its global business travel management

With global business travel management and expense processes sprawling across dozens of local systems and corporate card programs, 75 countries, and 18,000 far-flung employees, Weatherford needed a better way to manage travel and expense (T&E). The supplier of oil and gas technology and services found solutions, simplicity, efficiency, and savings with a suite of SAP Concur solutions.  

By consolidating tools, updating processes, and instituting expense management automation, the company gained consistency, compliance, spending visibility, and results like these: 

• 47% increase in workforce efficiency. 
• 90% fewer expense report rejections. 
• 26% less in travel and expense operations costs, with $5 million-plus in savings. 
• 770% leap in corporate card rebates and 100% T&E card adoption. 

“Weatherford has transformed a dispersed T&E department into a cohesive global program. Amidst exponential growth, SAP Concur has helped us streamline processes, enforce company policy, and deliver significant savings to the company,” says Jenni Allman, head of travel and expense at Weatherford. 

Given the extent of the challenge, Weatherford’s story provides lessons helpful for organizations intent on moving from disconnected, manual processes to a global business travel system that better serves the company and employees. Learn how Weatherford:  

• Faced challenges with its global business travel program as a result of acquisitions and expansion, and carefully identified goals to resolve the problems. 
• Designed a rollout of T&E solutions with the help of an implementation partner and SAP Concur. 
• Identified best practices for digital transformation, including executive buy-in, contingency planning, in-app and human support, and more. 

A clear need: Global travel management and digital transformation 

Across 80-plus years, Weatherford expanded into 34o locations in over six dozen nations. It didn’t set out to develop disconnected travel and expense systems and processes; it just grew into them, as many organizations do. The necessity for global travel management and digital transformation grew, too, especially for a company priding itself on delivering innovation to customers. 

Before its transformation, Weatherford’s T&E management looked like this, with these consequences: 

• Finance leaders lacked spend visibility across locations and departments, hampering budget planning, trendspotting, and action. 
• Regional leaders didn’t have real-time data, making it difficult to analyze spending and negotiate with vendors. 
• Many employees managed expenses on their own, traveled on cash advances, and booked outside of expense policy, complicating duty of care, compliance, and cost control.  

With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Weatherford’s travel ground to a halt. When travel resumed at high speed, however, processes and systems couldn’t keep up and employees were more reluctant to foot the bill for travel. The need for cohesive global travel management and automation became even more apparent. 

A key: Identifying goals of digital transformation and expense management automation 

While Weatherford knew it needed a better way, achieving that future state required envisioning the benefits global digital transformation and expense management automation should deliver. 

Leaders and employees alike wanted deeper insights, strengthened decision-making, an improved employee experience, and, of course, end-to-end simplicity and efficiency. They sought agile, data-fueled capabilities that could grow with Weatherford by providing: 

• Consistent tools, processes, and travel and expense policies supporting a dispersed workforce. 
• Real-time spend visibility across operations and locations. 
• Far fewer manual processes and reconciliation. 
• Streamlined audits and improved compliance. 
• Clean data and integration with other business systems. 

In essence, Weatherford sought a single a system and single source of T&E truth. It obtained both by building on its experience with Concur Expense, which the company already used in 11 countries. 

From complexity to control: Weatherford’s global T&E transformation 

Learn how the energy services company designed a modern and connected travel and expense system, the impressive results they’ve reaped, and best practices derived from hard-earned lessons. 

Read the case study

Planning digital transformation with SAP Concur solutions 

Weatherford is well versed in the latest technology. But bringing about digital transformation of its global business travel and expense management – one involving an overhaul of processes, technology, and culture – is a tall order for any organization. To ensure it was done right, the project team sought expertise to help design and manage the rollout of its selected SAP Concur solutions. 

Weatherford selected Acquis Consulting Group, an SAP Concur certified implementation partner, to roll out Concur Expense across the company. Cleaning up data and minimizing disruption were core goals, and the company locations with the most travelers, spending, and readiness embarking on the transformation first. A centralized, global travel management partner was embedded into Concur Travel, replacing dozens of local agencies. The rollout emphasized collaboration with IT, local finance leaders, and end users, and employee feedback and testing was used to continuously optimize the experience.  

One non-negotiable was solving integration issues with Weatherford’s ERP, which couldn’t import T&E data with reliability. Circling back to the clean data goal, the project team drew on its implementation and integration expertise to create a dashboard to compare information and find inconsistencies, simplifying resolution and reducing troubleshooting. 

Weatherford uses many solutions to transform global business travel and expense 

The foundation of Weatherford’s transformation was Concur Travel and Expense, an integrated solution that provides spend visibility, compliance, seamless user experience, and consistent application of travel and expense policies. 

Corporate card adoption is a noticeable accomplishment, reflected by 100% adoption and the 770% increase in rebates. “These rebates effectively offset the costs associated with SAP Concur licensing, resulting in a positive return on investment,” Allman says. 

During implementation and ongoing operations, Weatherford extended its T&E solutions and expense management automation with targeted solutions and services. 

• Company Bill Statements captures corporate card charges, assigns them to expense reports, eliminates manual matching by the finance team, and allows employees to quickly review and submit reports instead of typing in details. 
• Intelligent Audit automatically searches expense reports for out-of-policy spending and flags issues, enabling team members to focus on exceptions instead of perusing every single report. 
• WalkMe for SAP Concur solutions provides in-solution support and training so users get help when they need it, lightening the questions and load for Weatherford’s T&E team. 
• SAP Concur Advanced Care provides dedicated experts to troubleshoot, advise on configuration, and ensure Weatherford’s team has the resources it needs. 

Conclusion: Best practices for redesigning travel and expense management automation 

Choosing the right technology and partners is integral to transforming global business travel and implementing expense management automation. But a high level of success also requires practical steps, such as ensuring C-suite support for resources. 

Other best practices that Allman shares: 

• Embed flexibility and prepare for multiple contingencies, because obstacles will arise. 
• Involve stakeholders from across the company early and often. 
• Scrutinize and learn from mistakes along the way. 
• Design for travel and expense policy compliance by comparing current and future states for gaps. 
• Invest in support, especially if your T&E team is lean. 

With demonstrated successes, Weatherford is taking additional steps to improve policy compliance and operations, such as implementing Concur Tax Assurance by Blue dot to satisfy value-added tax (VAT) obligations for its global operation and increase reclaim. 

“The evolution of Weatherford’s T&E program from disparate systems to a robust, consolidated process using SAP Concur has allowed us to accelerate process efficiency and improvement at a pace not seen prior,” says Matthew Smith, Weatherford’s senior director of continuous process improvement.