IDP Education

The Challenge

IDP Education is a leader in global education services, operating across more than 50 countries. While digital innovation was central to IDP's growth strategy, their purchase-to-pay processes had not kept pace — expenses were handled manually in many countries, travel requests were tracked across disconnected platforms, and each country had developed its own methodology for interpreting the chart of accounts.

The result: inconsistent expense submissions, limited ability to drill down on spend data, and significant challenges when negotiating with vendors without consensus around categorisation.

The Solution

IDP deployed SAP Concur Expense, Concur Travel, and Concur Invoice — integrated with SAP Ariba — to unify spend management across the entire organisation. The implementation was delivered in three phases over nine months.

• Concur Expense replaced fragmented, manual expense processes across all regions
• SAP Ariba and Concur Invoice standardised supplier invoice handling and chart-of-accounts interpretation across countries
• Concur Capture automated data transfer between purchase orders, invoices, and goods receipts
• Cloud-based mobile access enabled leadership to review and approve from anywhere

The Outcome

With a unified platform, IDP gained a single source of truth for spend data across all operating countries. The finance team now tracks the full invoice lifecycle — from submission through approval to payment — with built-in audit trails that feed directly into team KPIs.

Manual processing time dropped significantly, and the business gained access to business intelligence insights that were previously impossible to surface — including trends, spend movement, processing speed, and overall efficiencies across the organisation.

Why This Matters

IDP's deployment illustrates a pattern we see across multi-country Australian organisations: the system works, but governance hasn't kept up. Inconsistent categorisation, manual workarounds, and limited spend visibility are not technology problems — they are governance gaps that compound over time.

For organisations at a similar stage — SAP Concur in production, but unsure whether controls and configurations still match the business — the Governance Risk Snapshot is designed to surface exactly these exposures.