(Forbes) - Business travel compliance is a hot topic due to new, confusing array of regulations – global health pandemic notwithstanding. Suffice it to say, any company with a mobile workforce that travels internationally can be affected by taxes, social security, and immigration regulations. This leaves open the potential for risks of fines, penalties, and sanctions against the company and even individual employees.
Within this dense alphabet soup of rules, regulations, and restrictions, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is also very relevant, and handling of very sensitive data is a priority. What this means is that the increase in data exchange between authorities with regard to registration comes down to higher visibility and therefore a bigger risk of noncompliance detection.
All of which brings about a huge challenge for human resources departments trying to adhere to the compliance complexity of these guidelines. The possible penalties organizations (and its individual travelers) can face are staggering: monetary sanctions, blacklisting, criminal prosecution, travel bans, visa restrictions, and reputation damage, among other consequences.
And, by the way, these resulting penalties can result in different amounts per country, based on a different set of rules in different locations. Like I said earlier – confusing.
A View to a Solution
From its interactions with its many clients, EY understood that every organization has a different appetite when it comes to risk. Flexibility was therefore needed in terms of data hosting, infrastructure, and the ability to be able to customize different business rules per client. Since the new regulations had its tenacious tendrils in multiple areas of a company – affecting HR, travel, corporate tax, finance, and other areas – EY was determined to make the relevant data flow from all areas for its customers to beat this situation.
The Arch-Nemesis of Business Travel Regulation Complexity
This is where EY comes to save the day like Mighty Mouse in super heroic fashion (but without the smash and flash) – rescuing organizations and their employees from the unforgiving clutches of compliance complexity and regulation run-arounds via the EY Business Travel Compliance solution.
By using EY Travel Compliance, EY’s customers and their employees are able to become compliant in a price-efficient way through automation. In fact, employee experience is improved because they no longer had to provide hundreds of data points manually just to initiate compliance service. Time saved for more important work. Then there’s the peace of mind part. The solution helped eliminate any sense of trepidation or unease on the part of employees, making business travel a bit less stressful. And that’s something all travelers can use a bit of right now.
What the Technology Actually Does
The EY Business Travel Compliance, developed on the flexible architecture of the SAP Integration Suite, provides a holistic secure technology service. What this tool does is leverage SAP SuccessFactors’ HR system while providing customer employees with a streamlined and enhanced user journey – encompassing all relevant country-specific information in a single portal.
Bottom line: This solution helped clients manage risk and compliance, improve efficiencies, and provide transparency and insights at the corporate level.
So, what happened after EY’s clients implemented the solution? To quote astronaut David Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Something wonderful.”
- Compliance level depending on business rules configuration increased by 100%
- Internal effort of HR teams was reduced by 60%
- Cost of downstream services dropped by 50%
By Michael Kure - Brand Contributor
Michael Kure is the lead marketing copywriter for the Customer Marketing Content Creation team at SAP.
