Newsbyte: SAP Addresses and Simplifies Global Business Travel Woes With Cloud Solution

BOSTON, July 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- As the pain and expenses associated with global business travel continue to increase, companies and business people alike are seeking effective and integrated software to help simplify the end-to-end process. SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new cooperation with partners and solution providers and increased availability of the SAP® Travel OnDemand solution, part of the company's growing portfolio of cloud offerings. The announcement was made at GBTA 2012, being held July 22-25 in Boston.

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SAP Travel OnDemand is designed to let financial officers and business travelers deftly handle the end-to-end process of travel and expense management faster and with lower cost while staying in compliance with corporate policies. The cloud-based solution is already available in the U.S. and Germany; 14 additional country-specific versions are now also available, including: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Country-specific versions adhere to national tax and statutory requirements, allowing for a seamless user experience for large, multi-national companies.

"Our main criteria was finding a fully integrated, one-stop travel solution, taking us all the way from pre-trip approval and online booking to expense reporting," said Tony Velleca, chief information officer, UST Global. "It also had to be easy to use and mobile. We looked at others, but ultimately SAP is the only one with three decades of experience in this area. SAP Travel OnDemand gave us a trustworthy and effective way to handle one of the most complicated processes in the company."

SAP has widened its ecosystem to offer customers more flexibility to choose leading local providers for their specific business travel needs. Building on its existing ties with Paymetric for payment card industry (PCI) compliance, SAP today announced new collaboration with best-in-breed technology players in areas such as mobile payment processing, smart receipt management and global online booking tools.

• Smart Receipt Recognition with OpenText: The leader in receipt recognition services, 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 the expense report, saving time and reducing steps for busy travelers.
• 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, which can now offer customers even greater flexibility to choose among multiple tools based on their specific requirements, all while staying within the SAP Travel OnDemand system.
• Mobile Credit Card Payment with AirPlus International: For business travelers 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 traveler.

Already a leader in on-premise financial and expense management, only SAP provides an integrated travel and expense solution to enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, including SAP® ERP Financials and SAP® ERP Human Capital Management. As a standard feature, SAP Travel OnDemand 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.

Since the March 2012 launch of SAP Travel OnDemand, SAP has doubled investment and committed to a faster pace of innovation, now delivering quarterly release cycles with new updates, features, partnerships and country versions to help ensure its customers take full advantage of the benefits of cloud applications.

Visit SAP at GBTA 2012, booth #2748. To learn more, visit the Cloud Computing page on sap.com and the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contacts:
Dorit Shackleton, +1 (604) 889-7841, [email protected] PDT
Kathrin Eiermann, +49 (6227) 7-67029, [email protected] , CET

SOURCE SAP AG