Multi-country setup

[Christy1]

I work in a large multi-national organisation, we are a diverse group with what I would call a federal set-up.  Each Operating company has a large amount of autonomy.  We are currently implementing Concur Professional for Expenses in  3 of our entities in 3 different countries with a view to roll out to a large number of entities over the next few years, circa 80k employees worldwide.  However we have hit some significant issues that we havn't been able to resolve.

1. Admins with access to SAE's in one entity will be able to see data in the other entities, we have found a solution of sorts whereby one entity will run the SAE and its sent to the other entities by secure FTP.  It seems strange to me that we cannot lock down data by entity. 

2. When we run reports by employee, we see all employees across the 3 entities so far the only option I've seen is to manually select the employees you want but each of out entities has 300 employees plus so its not practical.

I work for head office so we cannot have the other operating companies seeing our data and when we speak to our Concur Account manager they tell us that its not possible and that they have never had a request like ours, this seems really strange to me.

Has anyone implemented a set-up like I describe above or any ideas how we should design our setup?  Any advice would be much approciated. 

Let me know if further info is required.

Thanks

[ao]

Hi,

About SAE's I don't know, we don't use them.

About reporting (in case you mean Intelligence reporting): we also don't seperate permissions currently, but technically it should be possible to make the Cognos roles group-aware (and thus seperate permissions for example by employee groups). You need to define the feature hierarchy "Reporting" appropriately. I suggest to check the following documentation:

1.) https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/Cognos/Overview.pdf , section 3 -> "Reporting Hierarchy". Explains how to setup the hierarchy.

2.) https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Current/SG_Shr/Shr_SG_Feat_Hier.pdf . Explains how to configure Feature Hierarchies

3.) https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Current/UG_Shr/Shr_UG_User_Admin.pdf , section 3 "Reporting tab". Explains how to assign roles.

Hope that helps...

Regards, Alex

[Christy1]

Thanks Alex - we resolved the reporting issue.

[KayPellack]

I can speak to your first difficulty, although not with technical specificity. We have a 50+ country deployment of Concur Expense, and each country receives it's 'own' SAE.

Each day, one 'master' SAE is created. Our IT resources split that one file into individual files, in our case based on the employee group, which relates to country. These files are placed in secure folders which can only be accessed by authorized individuals within that country. So it can be done - however, our process wasn't created by Concur, which is why your account manager may not have advice to offer.

[Christy1]

Thanks KayPellack.

[RoyPietrow]

Issue 1:  You could likely create your own version of the SAEs that are specific to each entity rather than one global SAE that is pulling in data from everyone.  As an example, we don't use the SAE at all, but instead run custom reporting out of Cognos that pulls the required data we need.

Issue 2:  If you have assigned the Cognos role to different users, you can set up their view so that they only can see data from specific groups, as opposed to Global.

If you're referring instead to running reports for review in Processor, you can build custom queries so it's only pulling reports from one country, or several.

Hope some of this is relevant.

[Christy1]

Hi Roy,

Issue 1 - Thanks thats an interesting suggestion and I will raise this with concur and our IT, the admin access to the SAE's / custom extracts in Import/extract monitor is causing all our issues.  The issue I see with it is that by running the extract you only pick up approved claims that have not been extracted previously but maybe this can be managed in Cognos also

Issue 2 - I think this was the solution we actioned

Thanks

[tstagliano]

We have a 43 country deployment but we do not use the SAE.  WE adopted the Native integration and control who can process each report as part of the workflow by permission groups so only that user can see those respective reports but then the will consolidate all expense reports ready to be posted and puts them into a batch that is picked up every 15 minutes and loads those reports into our SAP financial system.  I would advise that you look into the native integration program instead of SAE

[Christy1]

Very few of our operating companies use SAP financial systems, where we do I believe we are using the native integration and it works well.