Lion

The Challenge

Lion, one of Australasia's largest beverage companies, relied on largely manual expense management processes with no integration to its SAP ERP system. Employees had to populate blank forms with all expense details, and receipts could not be attached at the expense item level — making approval and audit difficult and time-consuming. The company's external travel management company handled all corporate travel bookings, and Lion had little or no visibility into travel and expense spend, making it difficult to encourage compliant behaviours or report accurately on spending.

The Solution

Lion undertook a three-year phased project across both Australian and New Zealand operations:

• Implemented Concur Expense integrated with Lion's SAP ERP and SAP HR systems, enabling pre-populated fields, drop-down code selection, and automatic employee profile updates
• Deployed Concur Travel to give employees a direct self-service booking tool with embedded policy rules and preferred vendor controls
• Rolled out Concur Detect to move from auditing a small random sample of expenses to 100% automated audit coverage using AI and machine learning
• Developed 10+ custom reports through Consultative Intelligence, integrated into Microsoft Power BI dashboards for monthly spending insights and leader-level compliance visibility

The Outcome

Lion reduced expense processing time by at least 50% and achieved 85%+ direct booking rates through Concur Travel. With Concur Detect, the company moved to 100% audit coverage — identifying and auditing over 600 high-risk expenses in the first four weeks alone. The integrated platform gave Lion's leadership team real-time visibility into spend and policy compliance across both Australian and New Zealand operations, transforming what was previously a week-long manual investigation process into an automated, real-time output.

Why This Matters

Lion's journey from random-sample auditing to 100% automated coverage illustrates the governance gap many ANZ organisations face: controls exist on paper, but enforcement is inconsistent and visibility is limited. By the time non-compliance surfaces, the damage is already done.

The Governance Risk Snapshot helps organisations identify where these enforcement gaps exist — before they need a tool like Concur Detect to catch what manual processes missed.