By Anne Widjaja
SAP has made available new country-specific versions of cloud-based travel solution, SAP Travel OnDemand, and has established new local partnerships to enhance its functionality.
The SAP Travel OnDemand solution is designed to let financial officers and business travellers handle the end-to-end process of travel and expense management more efficiently, while maintaining compliance with corporate policies.
Since the March 2012 launch of SAP Travel OnDemand, SAP has doubled its investment in the solution. SAP is now delivering quarterly release cycles with new updates, features, partnerships and country versions, to enable customers to take full advantage of the benefits of cloud applications.
Although the solution was initially only available in Germany and the US, SAP has now released 14 country-specific versions of the product in: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.
SAP has also announced a new collaboration with leading technology players in areas such as mobile payment processing, smart receipt management and global online booking tools. These new partnerships will provide customers with more flexibility to choose local travel providers.
These new partners include:
• Smart receipt recognition with OpenText: OpenText’s solution interprets multi-lingual/multi-currency receipt images sent to SAP Travel OnDemand. It turns the images into machine-readable information and automatically pre-populates expense reports.
• Online booking tools with e-Travel by Amadeus and cytric by i:FAO: Adding to its existing successful cooperation with GetThere, SAP, is also working with the two leading online booking tools from Amadeus and i:FAO, while staying within the SAP Travel OnDemand system.
• Mobile credit card payment with AirPlus International: For business travellers short on time, SAP and AirPlus International plan to provide automated, near field communication (NFC) mobile payment processing to help reduce costs and simplify the credit card clearing process on the back-end, while also streamlining and drastically reducing the effort required by the traveller.
SAP provides an integrated travel and expense solution to enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, including SAP ERP Financials and SAP ERP Human Capital Management.
SAP Travel OnDemand also delivers add-ons for the SAP ERP application to the customer’s on-premise SAP system that automatically enables the integration from the cloud-based SAP solution.
