About the company
AstraZeneca was formed by a merger that brought together a pharmaceutical sales force of more than 7,000 and created an immediate need for a more sophisticated travel and entertainment (T&E) system. The new company inherited two T&E systems but ended up replacing them with Infor Expense Management, which provided workflow capabilities, improved compliance and employee satisfaction, and delivered greater visibility into the data.

Setting the strategy
Unhappy with its existing T&E systems, AstraZeneca began searching for a solution that would better meet its needs. "We wanted to accomplish several things," says Mike Herubin, manager of expense reimbursement at Astra Zeneca. "First, we were looking to reduce costs. We knew we could do that by better automating the routing and approval of expense reports, which would streamline the time involved in filing and minimize the manual keying of data. We also needed to improve enforcement and compliance. We wanted an automated system that could alert us to policy violations, use of non-preferred vendors, and the need for audit reviews.

"Next, we felt that having the ability to actually mine our data would give us the visibility necessary to save even more money and negotiate discounts with vendors. Finally, we wanted to increase employee satisfaction by solving some of the connectivity and access issues we'd been having and by providing faster reimbursement."