Helene,

Good morning. It took us a year to implement Chrome River Expense. It was not estimated to take that long but we did not have a great consultant and one who had never worked with Higher Education. We were also one of the first to implement Mercury, which our consultant also struggled. I think there is a great advantage implementing now vs 2016 with the biggest advantage being the rules you will be in charge of (the configuration team had to write all of ours) and that there are consultants dedicated just to Higher Education. All this being said, we have a great internal team which definitely helped us stay on track.

Hope this helps some.

Best of luck,

Tina

Hi Helene,
It took our university a little less than a year between signing the contract with SAP Concur and having pilot groups live in production. We had a PM and implementation team, and hired a program assistant to cover regular travel expense processing tasks while the travel program manager and team devoted time to configuration and campus training. We transitioned from one electronic system (Ellucian TEM) to Concur Request and Expense (we already had Concur Travel). This was for our employees only, and we have about 2400 employees profiled in Concur.
Good luck in your implementation!
Sally

Hi Helene,

MSU's process spanned 13 months from signing contract to implementation/go-live. We cross-trained our Expense Auditors in the support of Request, Travel and Expense as well as transitioning all paper expense reports to the system in conjunction with the implementation.

With over 13,000 employees converting, we built a robust team of support personnel as well as assigning pied pipers within the more active (travel) schools/departments to act as go-to's for simple questions.

Cheers, Ed

Thanks everyone for your very helpful responses!

We are still in the implementation process with Concur Request, Expense and we already had Travel. We don't have a contractor which would have helped a lot, but learning by doing having to extend our go live date by two weeks. Adding, we decided to incorporate our P-Card reconciliation which may be challenging as we already have cardholder not reconciling on time.

My question, can anyone share your experience with adding the P-Card piece and how people are reconciling? Are they reconciling on time? Just need some guidance.
Thanks so much.

The University of Alaska adopted, piloted and implemented Concur: Request (integrated with travel), Travel and Expense using Huron consulting in about a year. We previously managed travel through TEM and a paper process.

We are not using Concur for Pcard reconciliations but have discussed potentially adding this process down the line. We discussed either weekly or bi-weekly reconciliation through submission of card charges on an expense report. I imagine we would still experience cardholders not reconciling timely but the Concur process would make that more transparent and therefor easier to identify and correct. I am looking forward to hearing your experience with the addition of Pcard recons. Good luck!