About Quess
Quess Corp Limited is India’s leading business services provider and largest private-sector employer. They offer a host of services to help organizations manage their non-core activities in the areas of workforce management, operating asset management, and global technology solutions across industries and geographies.
Their team of over 3,34,000+ professionals spread across India, North America, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East offers solutions across areas such as general staffing, IT staffing and recruitment, facility management, security services, BPO, CLM, business intelligence, robotic process automation, and more. Their expert solutions are aimed at improving the operational efficacies for over 2700 clients across the globe.
Established in 2007 and headquartered in Bengaluru, Quess Corp has a market cap of approx. INR 5,410 cr as of June 30th , 2020. They are also ‘A Great Place to Work’ certified – a testament to their excellent culture, people, and processes.
Context
Quess is a fast-growing organization with 18 companies under its umbrella with a huge scale of business and 3,34,000+ associates. Offering workforce management, operating asset management, and global technology solutions, they have diversified business and finance teams with different travel policies across the organization.
Challenges Faced
Overview
At Quess’ organization size, geographical spread, and level of complexity, it is easy to see why managing the travel needs of such a large and diverse team – including approval, booking, reimbursements, cost control and tracking – proved to be a mammoth task. Moreover, travel policies are different in the different companies and divisions that make up the organization.
Challenge #1: Obtaining Approvals
All travel-related approvals used to take more than 24 to 48 hours which resulted in up to 15% increase in ticket cost due to fare jump.
Challenge #2: Managing Bookings
All travel and accommodation bookings were handled by Quess’ in-house travel team and they were unable to manage the numerous calls coming in, especially late at night.
Challenge #3: Managing Reimbursements
Reimbursement has become a major issue both for the finance team as well as employees.
The finance team was bombarded with calls regarding numerous unattended reimbursements that were in the pipeline. This meant their productivity went down drastically. Also, they were not able to retrieve all trip costs in a single place to report to higher management. Enforcing a policy and manual cross-verification manually consumed a lot of time and resources.
Quess’ employees too were low on morale given the delays and other unresolved issues with reimbursements.
Before TripGain: Prior Attempts at Resolution
Attempts were made at trying to control and bring all their travel costs and reimbursements
In one place using homegrown tools. This, however, proved to be expensive and labour-intensive. Quess’ – integration and cost control – goals continued to seem a distant dream without automation in place.
Introduction, Evaluation, and Selection: Why TripGain?
Upon exploring TripGain – a tool introduced to Quess by a travel company – they found that most of the requirements they had in mind was met by the tool.
After evaluating numerous tools available in the market, Quess decided to go with TripGain – a choice they made due to the integrated travel and expense capabilities of the tool, among other reasons.
So it was that Quess began using TripGain in March of 2019.
The Implementation Experience
After careful discussions to capture Quess’ processes and needs, implementation was carried out. A configurable tool, TripGain needed only a few customizations around expenses before Quess was onboarded successfully onto the platform.
After TripGain: Impact Areas
TripGain helped Quess to bring together the disconnected areas of their travel management efforts onto a single platform.
- Travel Approval Time: Average approval time has been reduced to 6 hours, thanks to TripGain’s all-integrated mobile app.
- Ticket Booking Time: Tickets are now booked in 10 mins after approval whereas it used to take more than 8 hours earlier.
- Compliance: TripGain helped Quess streamline all their travel-related processes. Compliance with policy has shot up to 89% from 60%.
| Key Features | |
| Most-Used Features | Travel approval
Expense filing |
| Best-Loved Features | Automated ticketing after approval
Information around total travel cost, including both commute and other expenses, for any trip |
- Travel Costs: Travel costs have reduced by 14%.
- Employee Morale: Employees now have visibility into their reimbursements. This contributes significantly to employee morale and satisfaction levels.
- Volume of Queries: The number of calls to the finance team has reduced drastically, saving almost 10 man-hours a month.
- Travel Team Size: The former travel team of five people has reduced to no more than one person now.
- Nature of Work: The travel team is now able to focus more on contracts and reconciliations rather than issues with reimbursements and the like.
- Management Needs: TripGain’s MIS helps management gain visibility into the facts and figures of travel management at Quess, thus facilitating timely action.
With TripGain being used, Quess’ resource use has reduced considerably and employee satisfaction metrics have gone up by no small margin. They are now looking to implement the tool globally across countries.
