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Chapter 2- IT’s About Business 2.1- Page 39 Graham Construction Digitizes Travel Expense Business Process With 13 offices and over 1,700 employees in Canada and the United States, Graham Construction is one of the largest construction companies in North America. The company is headquartered in Calgary and has been in business for more than 90 years. Graham’s involvement in construction projects consists of the preparation of building sites and construction of city public infrastructure. For example, in one of Graham’s recently awarded projects, the company will be in charge of the demolition work, excavation, shoring and dewatering, and the construction of sidewalks and street lighting. The project is part of the construction of a residential community in downtown Richmond, B.C., and Graham’s work is estimated to cost $267 million. With hundreds of these projects on the go, Graham’s success relies on the control of project expenses. In order to make these projects manageable and within budget, projects are broken down into hundreds of project elements that need to be closely monitored and controlled. Along with traditional building project costs such as building materials and machinery use, construction projects also require the work of engineers and other field work employees who need to visit the construction site regularly. After each visit, engineers need to submit all the expenses that they incurred in such visits, including travel costs (car, gas), accommodation costs (hotel), and per diem costs (food). By the end of a project, the cost of these travel expenses can add up to tens of thousands of dollars per project and therefore require close monitoring and control. However, unprecedented company growth and changes in regulations left Graham’s old employee expense reporting process obsolete. The previous system was user, approver, and workflow-unfriendly, and many expenses were inaccurately coded and many of them were not attributed to the right building project. For example, travel expenses incurred by an engineer in the construction of a new office building were coded for the construction of a school building. Part of the problem was that employees could not report expenses right away but had to store receipts, save them, and then do the job when they got back to their offices, the next day, and often even weeks later. One employee could easily employ over an hour to complete the paperwork necessary to report a travel expense to a building site, which would include photocopying meal receipts, gas receipts, hotel invoices, filling out and printing forms, putting all documents into an envelope, and addressing it to the right location. Once the administrative staff received the claim, they would have to acknowledge the receipt by mail and input the expense into the expense reporting system. If any information or document was missing, the complete expense would be returned to the employee to resubmit. The whole process was very manual. The company had estimated that processing low-value purchases could cost about $200 by the time it ran from end to end. Often managers needed to spend lots of extra time reconciling budgets and investigating expenses for which they were not responsible. In addition, the process of approving expenses was not built with the controls that the company desired and regulation requires. These all meant that the employee expense reporting business process needed to be replaced with something better that would not require employees to be tied to a desk entering

expenses, and that allows employees to enter and submit expenses on the go, right from a job site or as soon as an expense is incurred. The solution came in the form of a new information system that allows front line employees to report expenses on the go using their smartphones whenever and wherever they are. The new system allows for faster reimbursements, less time-consuming reporting and a mobile, paperless process; expenses are now being submitted on time with more consistency, with accurate coding and large savings. With the new expense system, low volume purchases are now put on purchasing cards, which are processed immediately with no paperwork involved and even offering a rebate. That way employees can spend more time doing what they are good at doing and like to do rather than inputting expenses and managing paperwork to trace expenses. Sources: Adapted from “Graham Construction Prides Itself of Ensuring Its 1,700 Employees Have the Right Tools to Do a Great Job–Whether They’re on a Job Site or Submitting Expenses,” Customer Case Study, www.concur.ca, accessed July 26, 2019; “Project Award—The Paramount,” www.grahambuilds.com, accessed July 26, 2019....