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Xaana.Ai for
Retail
Leveraging Data and Ai to power operations from manufacturing to customer satistfaction
Case Study
KAS Group Asia Increases Employee Productivity and Reduces Indirect Spending using Turium ALGOREUS and SAP Concur®
Xaana harnesses SAP Concur® + Turium ALGOREUS to achieve significant savings for indirect spending on non-product retail categories.
Customer Background
KAS Group Asia (KGA) provides direct and exclusive strategic sourcing to Australia and New Zealand’s iconic retail brands such as Kmart Australia and Target Australia.
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Being an integral and strategic part of Australia’s flagship retail brands’ products journey KGA supports them from product concept to the customers.
KGA manages its business in Asia under Kmart Australia Sourcing (KAS) and Target Australia Sourcing (TAS) supporting Kmart and Target with its operations spanning the largest sourcing markets across Asia including China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
"The KGA ecosystem consisted of many disparate technologies, including our SAP ECC and more modern S/4HANA ERP, an HCM Solution from SAP SuccessFactors, and other third-party banking and integrations. We wanted an implementation partner that would help us carefully plan an integration strategy. In Xaana, we found an SI and consulting partner that helped us to connect and navigate this complex landscape and notoriously challenging SAP ERP integrations, with our new employee expense reimbursement solution from SAP Concur."
Manish Goel, Delivery Manager – IT Finance
"We play in a very competitive market where things move very quickly, and speed is of the essence. The Xaana team helped our Business & IT team set the pace of the project by helping us meet all our complex requirements and helping us go live with the new Spend Management System on time."
Drivers for Change
Stanley Cheung – Finance Controller, KAS
The KAS group was looking for new technologies and new methods to drive better control, compliance and a user friendly, multi-platform system within non-product retail spend categories.
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The KGA group’s Business and IT representatives demoed several employee expense reimbursement software and after a careful vetting process selected SAP Concur to simplify and automate their approvals & workflows and eliminate paper trails and reduce administrative effort.
Purpose-Driven Partnership
Considering Xaana’s strong track record of working with customers to bring their innovative ideas to life, KAS Group choose Xaana as the service implementation partner to implement and integrate SAP Concur Expense and Request Modules with their SAP core business systems such as SuccessFactors and ERPs- SAP ECC and S4/HANA.
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The global rollout initiative was launched for 7+ entities of the KAS Group in Asia.
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Xaana consultants worked closely with KAS group’s Finance, IT, and team members during the discovery and design workshops to understand the business challenges and suggested a solution that embedded integration and API best practices to help KAS move beyond custom-coded integrations.
Xaana's team used a combination of SAP Cloud Platform Integration as well as Xaana’s ENIGMA platform library of reusable APIs and integrations to connect and integrate data between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur, speeding up daily employee data Integration with a pre-packaged approach and solution. The next job was to accelerate KGA’s system performance and seamlessly sync master data in ERPs and SAP Concur. The key integrations included replicating cost centres from ECC and S/4HANA to SAP Concur and replicating expense reports from SAP Concur to SAP ECC.
The team provided direct integration with SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA financial systems to create accurate data integrations for faster payments. The team also supported flexible mapping and conversion to support KAS Group Asia-specific integration use cases.
Making an Impact
Through the integrated employee reimbursement solution, the KAS group Asia is now on a journey to achieve significant operational efficiencies and productivity gains.
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Eliminating manual effort by automating employee claims out-of-pocket expenses and adding proactive controls & pre-spend authorisations.
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Streamlining and shortening expense processing time and improving the reimbursement approval cycle will result in faster payments and enhance organisational transparency.
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Creating a single view of organisational employee expenses, resolving employee queries faster, and minimising the issues of manual filling of expenses and lost receipts will lead to improving the user experience and employee productivity.
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Building a system architectural foundation will enable the KGA teams to reduce time to value and launch future innovations more quickly through the reuse of the integration solution levers and approach for core SAP business systems and technologies.
"Xaana and SAP Concur helped us in achieving more controlled, compliance driven and employee friendly system with a higher potential to drive efficiencies, productivity gains, automation and decision making through data insight."
Susheel Tanwar - Head of Finance, KAS Group Asia
About Turium ALGOREUS:
ALGOREUS specialises in systems integration and interoperability solutions, with a focus on knitting disparate databases, IOT systems, apps, and platforms together, so each component works together harmoniously, producing insights in real-time and delivering a capability greater than just the sum of its elements.
A Hybrid Intelligence (HI) system that combines the very different processing strengths of Artificial Intelligence and the human brain to result in a symbiotic powerful platform. Think of Turium ALGOREUS as the virtual twins of distributed neurons in the brain, linking historically siloed, disconnected systems to power smarter, more informed operations.
Move beyond traditional ESB, ETL, or ELT tools, don’t just connect the applications with the tools (do more than merely connecting the dots), enable bi-directional connection to operational and strategical systems, allowing decisions made in ALGOREUS to propagate holistically throughout the data supremacy landscape.
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About SAP Concur:
SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management solutions, driven by a relentless pursuit to simplify and automate these everyday processes. The highly-rated SAP Concur mobile app guides employees through business trips, charges are directly populated into expense reports, and invoice approvals are automated. By integrating near real-time data and using AI to analyse transactions, businesses can see what they’re spending and avoid possible blind spots in the budget. SAP Concur solutions help eliminate yesterday’s tedious tasks, make today’s work easier, and support businesses to run at their best.
Learn more at www.concur.com.au or the SAP Concur News Centre.
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