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Algorithmia: 50% of companies spend over 3 months deploying a single AI model

December 12, 2019 Big Data

Incorporating AI and machine learning technologies into everyday workflows isn’t as easy as the testimonials would have you believe. That’s the top-level finding from a survey of 750 business decision makers conducted by Algorithmia, which found that while machine learning maturity in the enterprise is generally increasing, the majority of companies (50%) spend between 8 and 90 days deploying a single machine learning model (with 18% taking longer than 90 days). Most peg the blame on failure to scale (33%), followed by model reproducibility challenges (32%) and lack of executive buy-in (26%).

“The findings of our 2020 [State of Enterprise Machine Learning] study are consistent with what we’re hearing from customers,” said Algorithmia CEO Diego Oppenheimer. “Companies are growing their investments in machine learning, and machine learning operationalization is maturing across all industries, but significant room for growth and improvement remains. The model deployment lifecycle needs to continue to be more efficient and seamless for ML teams. Nevertheless, companies with established ML deployment lifecycles are benefiting from measurable results, including cost reductions, fraud detection, and customer satisfaction. We expect these trends to continue as ML technologies and processes arrive to market and are adopted.”

Growth in hiring

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the barriers to adoption, machine learning expertise remains in high demand. Just over half of people polled by Algorithmia say that their companies employ between 1 and 10 data scientists, and 5% say they employ more than 1,000; 39% say they have 11 or more. That latter figure is an uptick from 18% in 2018, when the last State of the Enterprise Machine Learning survey was published.

Predictions of an industry-wide data scientist shortage seem prescient, given this context. In 2016, Deloitte anticipated a gap of 180,000 workers by 2018, and the number of data scientist job listings on LinkedIn increased more than 650% from 2012 to 2017.

Algorithmia anticipates that as the demand for data scientists grows, junior-level hires might be given less opportunity to structure AI efforts within their teams, as much of the program scoping is likely to have been done by predecessors. However, it could also mean that leadership alignment is likely to be granted, and that AI teams will have more ownership of and leeway in project execution.

Adoption and implementation challenges

Despite the fierce search for data science talent in the enterprise, nearly 55% of companies represented in the report say they haven’t yet deployed a machine learning model (up from 51% of companies last year). A full one-fifth are still evaluating use cases or plan to move models into production within the year, and just over 22% have had models in production for two years or fewer.

That jibes with a recent study conducted by analysts at International Data Corporation (IDC), which found that of the organizations already using AI, only 25% have developed an “enterprise-wide” AI strategy. Firms responding to that survey blamed the cost of AI solutions and a lack of qualified workers, as well as biased data and unrealistic expectations.

As alluded to earlier, moving models into production remains a challenge for most organizations, according to Algorithmia. At least 20% of companies of all sizes say their data scientists spend a quarter of their time deploying models, owing to pervasive scaling blockers like sourcing the hardware, data, and tools and performing the necessary optimizations. Versioning and reproducibility of models — which affect key processes like pipelining, model retraining, and evaluation — is yet another tall order for many.

Whatever the factors or combination of factors, budgets aren’t likely to blame. About 43% of respondents say their AI and machine learning spending grew between 1% and 25% from 2018 to 2019, while 21% say budgets for programs grew an average of 26% to 50%. In fact, only 27% of those surveyed noted that their spending hadn’t changed, which Algorithmia attributes to companies with AI maturity — i.e., those with deployed models at least two years old — doubling down on their efforts.

AI use cases

It’s not all doom and gloom.

Gartner reported in January that AI implementation grew a whopping 270% in the past four years and 37% in the past year alone. And according to the McKinsey Global Institute, the subsequent labor market shifts will result in a 1.2% increase in gross domestic product growth (GDP) for the next 10 years and help capture an additional 20% to 25% in net economic benefits — $ 13 trillion globally — in the next 12 years.

Algorithmia reports that among organizations that have deployed AI successfully, reducing company costs was among the most popular use cases, followed by generating customer insights and intelligence and improving customer experience. Of course, applications varied depending on the segment. For instance, banks and financial services firms are mostly focused on retaining customers and detecting fraud, while the energy sector — including utility companies — are laser focused on forecasting demand fluctuations. Respondents in consulting and professional services industries say that reducing customer churn was their top priority, while the education market’s top use case was interacting with customers.

It shouldn’t come as a shocker, then, that 9 in 10 of C Suite survey respondents characterized AI as the “next technological revolution” in an Edelman survey. Around 94% of tech executives responding to that study said AI will create innovative “smart” homes, while over 74% collectively said it would be “instrumental” in ramping up the development of autonomous cars, such as those from Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, Uber, GM’s Cruise, and others.

“This year’s survey should confirm … that machine learning in the enterprise is progressing in haste,” wrote the authors of the Algorithmia report. “Though the majority of companies are still in the early stages of [machine learning] maturity, it is incorrect to think there is time to delay your [machine learning] efforts. If your company is not currently [machine leraning]–minded, rest assured your competitors are, and the rate of AI’s development is bound to increase exponentially.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

IBM-Unilever blockchain pilot cuts wasteful ad spend

August 18, 2019 Big Data

A year-long pilot that uses blockchain to improve online advertising efficiency has yielded promising initial results, according to IBM CMO Michelle Peluso.

The project has already reduced pennies on the dollar of waste in the area of ad reconciliation and brought greater transparency to the complex gauntlet of intermediaries brand advertisers have to deal with, Peluso told VentureBeat in an interview this week. And there’s more to come, she said.

Peluso’s remarks are the first time the company has commented publicly about results of the pilot.

Reconciliation refers to the process advertisers use to ensure contracted agreements are actually delivered. Peluso estimated the average savings at 2 to 3 percentage points, though the company is still collecting results from its multiple brand partners.

The problem

On the one hand, online ads are highly effective because they’re more personalized than other forms of advertising. The sector has exploded, and this year online ads will for the first time account for more than half of the total advertising market.

But that growth has been accompanied by significant problems.

Just 20 years ago, Peluso explains, about 85 cents of every dollar spent by an advertiser made it to the publisher. The reason it wasn’t 100% is because an advertiser would pay modest fees to a creative agency, and perhaps a media placement firm. Today, at most only 40 cents of every dollar is getting through to the publisher, Peluso says. (The Association of National Advertisers cites similar numbers.)

IBM Unilever blockchain pilot cuts wasteful ad spend

Above: Michelle Peluso, CMO at IBM

Image Credit: IBM

This is largely because of the increasing number of intermediaries taking a cut along the way. A typical campaign now involves fees paid to an agency trading desk, an ad exchange, a demand side platform, a supply side platform, and various other networks. And that doesn’t include losses from things like click fraud or account for brand damage caused by an ad inadvertently appearing alongside objectionable content, not to mention obstacles like adblockers. “It’s gotten really cumbersome and less understandable,” Peluso said.

These challenges have spurred advertisers like Unilever, the world’s fourth-largest spender on ads, to take action. Keith Weed, who was marketing chief at Unilever until May, called the advertising ecosystem “a swamp.”

In an effort to turn the tide, Unilever has become the anchor brand in the IBM blockchain pilot consortium, which includes Kellogg, Pfizer, Kimberly-Clark, AT&T, and IBM’s own Watson. A full report on the pilot’s goals can be found here.

The results are enough to convince the group to move into full production in October, according to Babs Rangaiah, executive partner in global marketing at IBM’s digital agency iX, and a leader of the blockchain project. Rangaiah, incidentally, is also a former Unilever employee.

The consortium will expand to include several more partners, he said, with the goal of making the product an “industry-wide solution” and “better on a number of fronts.”

How it works

Blockchain creates “this trusted verified chain from my dollar to the end user, which promises to root out several inefficiencies in the market,” Peluso said.

First, blockchain can improve the speed of reconciliation and billing. Second, it can cut out the scores of intermediaries that have popped up to offer measurement, verification, and source attribution services — while taking a cut, of course. With one immutable source of truth, the need for these players will go away. Third, blockchain can help with issues like safety and fraud, documenting where the ads actually appeared, Peluso said.

IBM announced the launch of its blockchain pilot a year ago.

In the past, ad reconciliation was simple because you had a single trusted measurement source, like Nielsen. Now you might have 10 measurement sources. “There are some companies out there that literally have 10 people doing nothing but solving discrepancies all day because of all the difficulties,” said Rangaiah.

Advertisers are excited

IBM and its partners, including the major brands and agencies participating in the project, “are feeling excited” by the initial results, said Peluso. And the group has only just laid the foundation, with much more to come.

Peluso’s goal is to reclaim 15 to 20 pennies on the dollar within the next five years. “That would free up an extraordinary amount of capital,” she said. The global online advertising market is worth $ 333 billion this year, according to eMarketer. So savings of the kind Peluso is talking about would equal about $ 65 billion this year.

Over that same time frame, she wants the project to achieve clarity on the scope of fraud and brand safety issues advertisers face: “Because right now, honestly, for all of us, it’s a little bit shooting in the dark,” she said.

The project has so far successfully automated campaign transparency and reconciliation, both new capabilities, Rangaiah said. But included in the next improvements, he said, will be applications that various partners want built on top of the blockchain foundation. These include seamless payment systems, better identity-level targeting, and impression-level data capabilities.

One particularly interesting application IBM is planning will help players along the blockchain target users more efficiently by leveraging encrypted first-party data across the chain. “With the blind trust within blockchain,” Rangaiah said, “you’d be able to use first-party data for both publisher and marketer in a way that currently you aren’t able to because it’s encrypted and you can only see your own data that you are technically ‘allowed’ to see.”

IBM charges an upfront fee to cover the small cost involved in providing the blockchain technology layer, but it plans to make money from applications built on top.

By the end of 2020, IBM hopes to have a solution that is “really industry-wide,” Rangaih said, and that incorporates many of the applications mentioned above. Partners are giving IBM feedback on those applications now, he said.

Another key player in the IBM consortium is software company Mediaocean, an important intermediary that does everything from planning to insertion orders, invoicing, media buying, and purchase orders — touching more than $ 140 billion in annual ad spending. The company already has the data from 5,000 publishers integrated into its system, saving IBM from having to build out the advertiser ecosystem itself. Mediaocean simply puts its software on top of IBM’s blockchain product, called Hyperledger.

IBM acknowledges Mediaocean’s role with the project’s name: “The IBM Mediaocean Blockchain for Media,” though Rangaih concedes “I think we need a nice catchy name.”

Despite the project’s early successes, winning wider acceptance for blockchain technology is a formidable challenge, both Peluso and Rangaih acknowledge. “To really make blockchain work, you have to convince everybody to be on the blockchain, and there’s plenty of people who have a vested interest in not doing that,” Peluso said.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Mike Pence: ‘Spend More Time On Your Knees Than On The Internet’ as Lewinsky produces “Impeachment”

August 8, 2019 Humor

Because missionaries had a difference of opinion, one should kneel in contrition, intense supplication, or adoration.

In other such news, the story of the Equal Rights Amendment comes to FX with Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly.

in further wigs, there’s also Elizabeth Banks as Jill Ruckelshaus, Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan, and Sarah Paulson as a composite character named “Alice” pic.twitter.com/TPTEaxGxZw

Ã¢ÂÂ Jackson McHenry (@McHenryJD) August 7, 2019

Also, American Crime Story on FX will present “Impeachment” in September 2020.

No truth to the rumor that either of these projects are being developed: a Jeff Epstein biopic or a graphic novel of the 2016 civil suit accusing Individual-1 of rape.

“American Crime Story” Season 3 is officially moving forward with the FX series set to tell the story of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Beanie Feldstein will star as Monica Lewinsky, with Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp and Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones. The season will be based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President.”

The third installment will be written by Sarah Burgess who will also executive produce alongside Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Brad Falchuk, Larry Karaszewski, Scott Alexander, Alexis Martin Woodall, and Paulson. Lewinsky will serve as producer along with Henrietta Conrad and Jemima Khan. Fox 21 Television Studios and FX Productions will produce.

variety.com/…

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What’s Your Spend Management Costing You?

July 19, 2019 BI News and Info

You’ve hit your spending limit. Using outdated manual, paper-based systems to track expenses is costing your organization money and your own employees’ sanity. With employees spending more money across more channels than ever before, the difficulty of keeping track of spend as an organization is skyrocketing. Answer the following question to see where your own organization currently stands:

Of the list below, what do you want to be true for your company?

Streamlined systems
Maximized productivity
Accurate spend data
Enabled and satisfied employees
Efficient spending
All of the above

We’re going to take a wild guess and say you picked all of the above. The way you decide to set up your expense process affects every facet of your business. And that means manual expense reports are taking a bigger toll on your company than you might think.

The true cost of spreadsheets

Doing things the hard way is also the expensive way. It costs 39% of businesses more than US$ 6 to process a single invoice. Multiply that by the number of expense reports you handle each month, and you could be looking at a pretty substantial hit. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg:

What does the average expense report cost for your organization? Let’s do the math: The number of hours spent on expense reports multiplied by the average hourly salary of your staff, divided by the number of expense reports you process per year, will give you your organization’s customized number. It looks like this:

(Hours spent annually on expense reports) x (Average hourly rate of your processing staff) ÷ (Number of expense reports per year) = Cost per expense report

1561042747965 costperreport whitebg What’s Your Spend Management Costing You?

Now that you know how much your expense report is costing you, let’s dive into how automation can help.

Stay streamlined

You can happily say goodbye to inefficient, manual processing and say hello to an automated and connected travel, expense, and invoice solution. With automation on your side, your organization can confidently operate with reliable and streamlined expense data. Removing unnecessary steps such as printing out documents and manually filling out information will not only benefit today’s processes but multiply in value as your organization grows and changes. Still not convinced? Then ask yourself these four questions:

Is your accounts payable invoice system scalable for growth?
Could your expense process be simplified with a streamlined solution?
Are your employees and stakeholders getting frustrated with your process?
Do you have the necessary technology support needed to keep your invoice system running seamlessly?

Maximize productivity

As employee spending becomes more complex, the manual reporting process gets even more painful, making your reports a recipe for wasted hours, days, and dollars. This translates into finance and AP personnel spending a significant amount of their time with manual tasks, while financial decision-makers spend a lot more of their time trying to analyze and interpret data. Hours spent x employee hourly wage = Cost of manual process

1561042632233 costofmanualprocesses whitebg What’s Your Spend Management Costing You?

With the help of automated, integrated solutions, you can move many manual, frustrating, and mundane tasks off your employees’ plates and free up more time for yourself and others to focus on strategic tasks that promote growth. Attaining efficiencies in AP workflows alone results in spending 68% less time processing invoices – just imagine what you could do with all that free time.

Report accurately

Everybody makes mistakes, but when 10% of invoices have errors, something needs to change. Companies that use a mixture of paper and spreadsheets to process expenses are especially prone to this problem. Paper receipts can get lost, and it’s not hard to imagine the manual errors that can crop up when copying data into a form. Manual processes are prone to inaccurate data entry and even fraudulent practices, which can result in the following:

20% of businesses say that reconciling duplicate invoices is among their top challenges with processing paper invoices, according to IOFM’s research.
Inventories can easily be off with data entry, causing overcharges—all of which can cause mistrust and confusion between you, your customers, and your employees.

Updating to automation can reduce these errors by more than 90%. By catching duplicate entries, and automatically flagging expenses outside of policy, the back-and-forth from your employee to your accounting team is virtually eliminated. All communication can be handled within the system, and completely documented for auditing purposes.

Improve employee satisfaction

Reducing your employees’ time spent manually creating and entering expenses, plus eliminating the need to keep up with paper receipts, lightens the load and boosts morale within your organization. Automating your workflows and implementing best practices for your accounting staff will significantly improve accuracy, cycle time, and employee satisfaction.

But the frustration doesn’t end with submitting expenses. Employees often wait a long time to get reimbursed, too. The average time is 8 days from approval to reimbursement, but sometimes it can take even longer. And that’s a whole lot of time spent shouldering an out-of-pocket expense. Thanks to automation, ease of use, and the availability of apps on mobile devices, various groups of employees are saving substantial time to submit and review expenses.

Easy-to-use mobile tools that provide consumer-like experiences at work connect your employees to the apps they already use at home, making booking travel, submitting expenses, and approving invoices simple and fast. When it comes down to satisfaction, it’s plain and simple: Your company will be able to effectively retain people with better systems and processes.

Maintain compliance and efficiency

Several hidden costs can fall through the cracks when using manual processes, including labor costs and fraud. Labor costs are causing many organizations to spend nearly twice as much on invoicing processes than they would with more efficient and streamlined solutions. In other words, businesses are unknowingly throwing away a lot of money.

Paper processes are also extremely vulnerable to fraud, a cost no one wants to deal with. According to ACFE’s 2018 report, the typical organization loses 5% of annual revenue to fraud each year with a total of $ 7B in reported occupational fraud loss in 2017. Sixteen percent of businesses have suffered check fraud within the past two years, according to IOFM reports. Yikes.

By utilizing AI to detect signs of fraud and built-in policy compliance, you can focus on preventing fraud rather than recovering from it. By putting a microscope on this area of spend, you can prevent fraudsters who may be active in more than one area of the business. Automation mitigates potential fraud by restricting the ability to approve invoices and initiate payments to authorized individuals. Real-time visibility into all processes prevents unauthorized individuals from accessing sensitive data. Ultimately, automated processes can help you better keep track of your organization’s money, as well as:

The great news is, you can do it!

Luckily, it’s easy to make the move from manual to automated, one-off to streamlined, and at risk to at ease.

In today’s fast-paced business climate, organizations in every sector are under pressure to do more with less. This means organizations cannot afford to squander opportunities to free up their working capital. Automating spend management with modern, easily integrated solutions just makes sense. Get clunky systems out of the way to focus on what’s driving your organization today.

This article originally appeared on Concur Newsroom.

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Digitalist Magazine

HOW RETARDED DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO SPEND MONEY ON THESE?

March 7, 2019 Humor

Tiny handbags costing $ 500:

Paris Fashion Week debuted last week and the most talked about sensation is the micro handbag.

High fashion designer Simon Porte stunned everyone during his Jacquemus catwalk show when models were carrying tiny handbags. The handbags are two inches long and are smaller than a credit card according to The Guardian. (RELATED: Here’s Why Designers Are Being Told Not To Hire Underage Models For Fashion Week)

The bag is apparently a smaller version of an already really small handbag Jacquemus released called Le Chiquito. That small bag measured four inches by two and a half inches.

Why there needed to be a bag smaller than the Le Chiquito I am unsure. This trend seems wild. The Le Chiquito retailed for only $ 500 which seems low to me for something that it supposed to be high fashion.

The French fashion label has not released a price for Le Mini Chiquito yet according to The Guardian, but I would not be shocked if it were more expensive than its bigger version.

People seem to be excited about these, even though all they can hold is air and maybe a breath mint. I can maybe understand because they are really cute, but you better have a different place to hold your necessities.

Elle Magazine labeled this bag the “New It Bag”, but I think I might have to pass on this trend.

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

like his 2020 campaign, 45*'s state funeral planning begins, will spend eternity in New Jersey

December 7, 2018 Humor

Former President George H.W. Bush will be laid to rest Thursday on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University.

The best revenge is that the Trump Presidential library will probably be located on one of his golf course properties, a (Roger) stone’s throw from the ball-washers.

(2017) In Bedminster — a wealthy horse-country town 43 miles west of New York City — officials had some concerns about hosting a reality TV star’s tomb.

President Trump already has a family burial plot: His parents and his brother Fred are buried together at All Faiths Cemetery in Queens.

So it was a surprise, back in 2007, when Trump announced he wanted a mausoleum for himself in New Jersey.

“It’s never something you like to think about, but it makes sense,” Trump told the New York Post. He was 60 years old at the time. “This is such beautiful land, and Bedminster is one of the richest places in the country.”

The plan was big: 19 feet high. Stone. Obelisks. Set smack in the middle of the golf course. In Bedminster — a wealthy horse-country town 43 miles west of New York City — officials had some concerns about hosting a reality TV star’s tomb. The huge structure would seem garish, out of place. And there were ongoing worries that the spot might become an “attractive nuisance,” tempting curiosity-seekers to trespass on club grounds.

Then again, there’s the Bernie Sanders presidential library site…

.The town must have really ticked him off. “A man says he built a massive sculpture of a middle finger off a Vermont highway to show the local government how he really feels. ….he spent $ 4,000 on the sculpture near Route 128 in Westford.” https://t.co/3oahbUKz6B #Vermont pic.twitter.com/oWCOmrNtkJ

Ã¢Â€Â” Victoria Hudson (@TheirVictoria) December 4, 2018

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It’s Time For Intelligent Spend Management. Here’s Why.

November 8, 2018 BI News and Info

For those charged with managing spend, there’s a big transition underway. Businesses across all industries face intensifying pressure to be more flexible, disruptive, and nimble. The leaders of procurement, supply chain, finance, and accounts payable are being called to help their organizations adapt to changing needs, drive change, and adopt new business models.

This is no small task, as these are big, strategic business priorities. And to achieve them, individuals responsible for spend management will need to go beyond baseline metrics like efficiency, productivity, visibility, compliance, and cost savings. Companies need to complement them with a focus on new priorities for managing spend, such as:

Delivering transparency to manage supplier risk and brand reputation

Revolutionizing both the information used to make decisions and the quality and speed of the decisions themselves

Creating new ways to connect with business partners and develop new business and delivery models

Delivering insights by gathering and analyzing information from new and exploding data sources

We refer to this as the intelligent spend-management agenda.

Five keys to intelligent spend management

By bringing more intelligence to every part of the spend-management process, procurement leaders can tackle these new challenges – and make incremental progress on this agenda – in five key areas:

Employing a nimble approach to managing data: Spending generates all kinds of data. To manage spend, business systems need to interact with data coming from business processes, social sources, suppliers, and more. This requires a new approach, not the 1990s-era model that moves data from one place to the next.

Embedding intelligence from end to end: Disconnected, siloed solutions with embedded intelligence can learn only from the parts of the process they manage. These intelligent technologies need exposure to a holistic view of spend-related data to learn and continuously improve decision-making across the source-to-settle process.

Connecting across the business: The process of managing spend touches many other parts of a business. It’s essential that the processes and systems managing everything from supply chain and manufacturing to finances and CRM be integrated.

Capturing data beyond the four walls of the business: The data needed to manage spend doesn’t come exclusively from within the business. It also comes directly from suppliers and other sources or systems. Procurement needs a way to easily and automatically connect with third-party sources and store and analyze collected data.

Easily adding extensions and enhancements: To address unique regulatory requirements and other specifics, procurement must be able to easily tailor and enhance its spend-management solution with APIs and extensions. (For example, they can tap into targeted third-party solutions or add their own functionality.)

Intelligent spend-management solutions available today

Achieving all of this requires investment in the right IT infrastructure and systems to put intelligence to work in a consumable and predictable way. Intelligent technologies embedded from end to end can connect systems and processes across the extended enterprise through a commerce network. At the same time, this approach brings more intelligence to procurement, supply chain, and spend-management processes, thereby augmenting the expertise of users by providing:

Intelligent experiences – simple, consumer-like, and contextual that guide users to exactly what they need

Intelligent processes that continually and dynamically improve based on data, behavior, and results

Intelligent insights through embedded analytics that serve up relevant, future-focused assessments and recommendations at the point of action

As a result, procurement organizations are equipped to make incremental improvements on everything from cost control to efficiency and supplier risk. They can take massive leaps forward in their ability to make smarter decisions faster, be more focused and effective, and get more done in less time.

Learn more

Want to learn more? Register now for our upcoming webinar, “Explore the Future of Intelligent Procurement: Countless Inputs. Powerful Outcomes,” on November 29 at 11:00 a.m. EST, featuring a panel discussion with leading analysts. You’ll leave with a better understanding of how to reimagine procurement through the strategic use of intelligent applications.

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Digitalist Magazine

Three Ways Technology Can Modernize Employee Spend For State And Local Government

October 1, 2018 BI News and Info

While constantly reshaping the global economy, technology has enabled employees and businesses to run more efficiently. Despite its clear benefits, the adoption of new technology by state and local governments has been somewhat slow.

Although limited resources or regulatory restrictions may be valid reasons not to upgrade, 47% of state and local government employees responded in a GCN survey that it’s actually due to a lack of prioritization by leadership. But even more shockingly, 80% of respondents in the same survey said their agency was not open-minded to adopting a cloud-based solution.

With old processes becoming more frustrating for employees to deal with, state and local agencies are now facing increasing pressures to adopt more modern technologies like intelligent cloud applications, data analytics, and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Because it’s impossible to ignore and critical to tackle, CFOs at the state and local levels are looking for solutions.

Employee-initiated expense challenges solved with technology

The second-largest employee expenditure next to payroll, employee-initiated expense is one of the largest transactional aspects of government spending. But the survey from GCN discovered that only 16% of public sector employees reported having access to cloud web-based systems for submitting expenses. In fact, 40% of public sector employees still use pen and paper, making expenses difficult to track, prone to errors, and vulnerable to risk.

But technology can help relieve these common pain points. Matt Gibbons, senior director of government and contractor sales at SAP Concur, spoke more about using technology as a solution: “Automating internal processes and turning to cloud-based solutions is an easy and effective way to improve transparency and redirect efforts to citizen-facing programs, which is critical for state and local governments that face tighter budgets.”

Better control and reduced spending: this is just one of the areas that technology can help when it comes to automating expenses.

How technology can revolutionize your employee spend management process

Cost savings, scalability, and improved security can help agencies focus on strategic initiatives rather than approving expenses. But just how does expense software achieve this? Automate the process, collect the data, and start putting useful insights to work.

1. Control employee spend, reduce costs

Employees are spending more money, across more spend categories, using more payment methods than ever before. That’s more vendors and suppliers to keep tabs on and more payment methods to approve and record. How is it possible to keep up with the multitude of growing data within the spend industry? Especially when papers and receipts start to build up, and you can’t locate where you put that one expense report…

Technology that helps manage employee-initiated spend can eliminate paper and make it easy for employees to enter, track, manage, and audit expenses with just a few clicks. With a mobile application, you can easily manage expenses anytime, anywhere, saving you time and improving employee satisfaction. Take photos of receipts on the go and automatically generate expenses to give employees time back in their day so they can get back to doing what they do best.

Stop chasing paper receipts. Streamline expense, travel, and invoice technology to better manage employee spend:

Automate expenses from receipt to reimbursement
Proactively manage spend with AP automation
Turn employee spend data into actionable insights
Reduce costs and identify waste

2. Increase productivity, achieve scalability

Tracking employee spend data by hand is slow and tedious. GCN found that more than 80% of public-sector respondents said it takes two weeks or more for expenses to be approved. In today’s modern workforce, two weeks is quite a long time. Technology is changing the expectations for how work gets done, and it’s not just the digital natives. Now all generations are accustomed to, and expect, simple, easy-to-use experiences at work.

Whether on the road or in the office, automated, mobile technologies can help improve employee satisfaction and increase your productivity. Automated budget, expense, and audit technologies can quickly process employee spend data and notify you of any suspicious transactions, all while staying on top of budget to avoid overspending. At the same time, traveling employees can actively update new expenses through mobile devices and receive reimbursements faster. Mobile itineraries can help employees stay updated, on-time, and safe when plans go awry.

Transform your productivity with technology in these three areas:

Budget forecasting and strategy

Capture and consolidate data for a holistic view of employee spending
Control and adjust budget to change business needs
Improve accuracy and timeliness of spend

Employee expense tracking

Automatically categorize and map expense based on receipt images
Streamline expense management
Enforce policy compliance
Reimburse employees faster and improve user experience

Policy and expense auditing

Instantly certify each expense against your own policy
Identify non-compliant expenses prior to reimbursement
Ensure that all employees are compliant using independent auditors

3. Reduce FW&A, improve financial security

Agencies that manually track spend are even more prone to fraud, waste, and abuse (FW&A). Unlike technology, humans can make errors and carry biased opinions about which expenses break policy.

Intentional or unintentional, employee fraud is more common than you think. In 2018, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) found that 18.7% of employee fraud occurs in government entities, costing state and local agencies $ 180,000 each time it occurs.

But employee fraud isn’t always malicious. Sometimes it’s due to the complexity of government travel policies, which are often difficult to understand even for the most experienced travelers. Evidence of such waste was reported in 2016 by the DoD’s Inspector General, citing $ 458 million in total losses due to improper payments issued in 2014 alone.

Expense report technology can detect fraud and compliance issues in near real time. Analyzing 100% of expense reports, artificial intelligence can help reduce expense report errors by 60% and capture 10X the amount of errors and fraud, detecting patterns and anomalies that humans can’t see. It can even spot accidents versus malicious intent, so you can isolate repeat offenders from the majority of users who sometimes make accidental claims.

Help identify risks and opportunities for savings by using a preventative and detective approach to reduce FW&A:

Execute consistent policy enforcement across the agency
Pay only valid reimbursement claims
Focus on resolving fraud, not identifying it

Simplify employee spend challenges

Maximize your control, efficiency, and transparency with cloud-based technology that modernizes your expense, travel, and invoice processes.

This technology gives government agencies greater oversight and control over employee-initiated spending. Workflow is streamlined through a cloud-based system that efficiently manages the entire expense process from spend request to reconciliation in an automated workflow – improving accuracy, reducing reimbursement cycle time, and freeing personnel to focus on the agency’s mission.

The solution can be configured to enforce agency and regulatory policies and to create reports that ensure compliance and spend tracking, helping to reduce or eliminate FW&A. The open platform easily links to ERP, human resources, and accounting systems to consolidate expense data into a single, connected process.

Looking for more? Learn about SAP Concur’s state and local government solutions for modernizing employee spend.

Why have AI, machine learning, predictive insights, and digital assistants become the must-have new tools of forward-thinking CFOs to drive business performance? Watch the Nov. 6 webcast.

This article originally appeared in the SAP Concur newsroom and is republished by permission.

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Employee Purchase Cards: Reducing the Spend and Risk

September 27, 2018 FICO

Employee purchase cards (P-Cards) are work credit cards that are provided by most universities and state governments to many of their employees for smaller, routine purchases. These P-Cards can streamline the process of making purchases, saving the organization both time and money. P-Cards are much more cost effective than using the full procurement processes (soliciting three bids, etc.) for smaller purchases, such as an item costing $ 15.

The challenge for most organizations is that while P-Cards can provide a cost-effective and efficient tool for small dollar purchases, they can also easily be abused. Managers and auditors are tasked with reviewing P-card purchases but often, given their other workloads, these purchases are not adequately reviewed.

Employee Purchase Cards – Why Use Them?

In a typical procure-to-pay process, five percent of transactions account for 90% (or more) of the total spend. These larger transactions rightfully require significant controls, contracts and approvals. P-Cards can dramatically reduce the cost of the significant number of small dollar, routine purchases. A typical procurement process requires filling out a purchase requisition, obtaining one or more approvals, receiving an invoice, cutting a check, etc. While these processes exist for good reason, on a small dollar purchase (for a specialized screwdriver for example) the time and cost of completing all of the procurement steps can far exceed the cost for the item purchased and can frustrate the employee who has to complete the paperwork.

Purchase cards allow for this process to be skipped, which not only provides convenience to the employee but reduces the overall cost of the item being purchased. Often suppliers will take labor-intensive administrative efforts like submitting bids, preparing specialized invoices, submitting a request for payment, and waiting 30-45 days to be paid, into consideration when setting a price. The more streamlined the purchasing process, the more they can lower their price. This is why using a P-Card and bypassing the traditional procurement process can potentially allow for significant savings as well as reducing the effort and frustration for staff.

P-cards also give organizations the ability to use controls to reduce their risk exposure. For example, most P-Cards allow you to implement daily or monthly spending caps on individuals, and provide controls as to which merchant categories can be used. These controls can reduce your risk of exposure, but certainly not eliminate it entirely.

Employee Purchase Cards – What Are The Challenges?

For all of the benefits that P-Cards can provide, they carry inherent risks. P-Cards bypass normal procurement controls, reviews and approvals. This means that staff can purchase unintended items, exposing the organization to a loss of funds, reputational risk, and other organizational risks. As I discussed in a prior blog, even a $ 4 mistake can be costly to an organization.

P-Cards are also more likely to be used for fraudulent and abusive activities. We have seen, for example where an item was purchased with a P-Card, and was also submitted for reimbursement through the expense reporting channel. Given the separation of these two channels, these types of duplicate expenses often go undetected with traditional review processes.

Another challenge is that P-card usage can lead to PO leakage (where an employee pays more for an item by bypassing the preferred vendor) because an employee may purchase an item from a convenient vendor, instead of the preferred vendor. Over time, losses from PO leakage can be significant, running into the millions of dollars. These transactions are often missed in the manual review processes existing in most organizations today. One way to overcome this is to make it easier to use the preferred vendor. Experience has also taught me that the easier an organization makes it to purchase items using the “correct” process, the more likely the employee will do the right thing.

Employee Purchase Cards – How Advanced Analytics Can Help

Given the staffing constraints of most organizations, it is almost impossible to fully review 100% of P-Card transactions. This why a new approach is needed. Technology is now available to perform an automated review of 100% of transactions. These reviews can identify:

Outlier transactions, where the unit price paid or the quantity purchased does not match historical norms.
Travel expenses incurred outside of defined standards, including the nightly rate paid for a hotel in a given city, the class of airfare purchased (e.g., First Class), or the location of a hotel as compared to the approved travel location.
PO Leakage, where an item was purchased at a price higher than the negotiated contract
Split purchases, where a single transaction is split into multiple transactions to bypass procurement rules
Purchases which require additional contractual controls (e.g., HIPAA, Data Security, Personal Information, etc.)

In addition, many merchants now provide significant information with each P-Card transaction, called “Level 2” and “Level 3” Data. Detailed transaction level details on each item purchased is provided, allowing for a full analysis of the specific items purchased and comparisons between what is being reported by the merchant with the receipts that accompany the transaction.

Employee Purchase Cards – Join Us For A Webinar On The Topic

P-Cards are a valuable tool for large organizations. While they can open the organization up to the possibility of abuse and other risks, P-Cards can save the organization money, time and effort. These significant benefits make it even more critical that organizations find a way to counteract potential challenges. Using analytics, organizations can increase their protection and reduce costs without making the P-Card process more cumbersome for its employees.

For more on expenses abuse, check out some of our other posts on the topic:

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FICO

Two Business Trends Driving Change In Spend

September 17, 2018 BI News and Info

By now, you’re accustomed to an ever-increasing list of priorities and an ever-decreasing budget with which to get them done. In some areas, you may be able to get by, but in others, sticking with the status quo can cost you more than it’s worth.

Travel and spend management is one area where your organization may be missing out by making do. Whether deciding to automate just part of your expense process, building your own solution, or settling for technology that’s “good enough,” an inefficient, antiquated approach can hold you back. It limits your ability to capture spending and identify trends, causing you to leave money on the table and opening up your organization to legal and financial risks.

Now, more than ever, it’s time to rethink your approach. Two key trends are disrupting the business landscape, presenting enormous challenges and leaving your organization vulnerable to hidden costs like never before.

Purchasing power is in employees’ hands

Spending that was once under the control of your organization has now shifted to the employee. Employees are increasingly booking their own trips with airlines and others directly, choosing their own places to stay, and making purchases conveniently right from their mobile phones. In fact, the number of SAP Concur clients using Airbnb increased 42% from 2016 to 2017, including 63% of Fortune 500 customers. And the reality is, your technology likely isn’t set up to address this change.

When you can’t see all that’s being spent, you can’t control that spending. And unfortunately, you may have more invisible spend than you think. According to an August 2018 study by GBTA, 37% of hotels and 15% of flights are booked outside corporate channels, while just 20% of companies use technology to capture outside bookings. When you have limited visibility into what vendors are being used, you miss out on the opportunity to negotiate rates and risk leaving money behind. Moreover, as the amount of employees who purchase directly with suppliers continues to rise, so will the amount of cash you’re missing.

Rising tax and compliance regulations

Employees aren’t the only ones changing the way they do things. Governments are, too. Hungry for revenue, they continue to impose new taxes and make changes to regulations, and are increasing their investigations to crack down on violators.

“Good enough” isn’t going to cut it when it comes to meeting regulations. With more ways and more channels for employees to spend, you need to stay on top of every expenditure and every vendor. When your organization is audited, investigators will expect comprehensive, accurate reporting on all transactions. But if you’re still relying on an outdated, reactive approach, your chances of being successful are slim to none – resulting in executive involvement, additional costs, and a hard hit to your organization’s reputation.

As these two business trends bring change to your organization, how you approach your travel and spend should change, too. Embrace modern technology that integrates data across all sources, connects you to all your employee spending, captures every transaction, detects fraud immediately, and gives you the data you need to prove compliance.

Learn more about how to capture and manage ALL your employee spend and mitigate regulatory risks with SAP Concur.

This article originally appeared on Concur.com.

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