Innovation is at the core of Belgium’s leading logistics and transport provider, Lineas (former B Logistics). Through implementing ‘smart technology’ and a ‘better, faster’ mentality with their Green Express Network, it makes sense that they promote this mindset internally to their European wide network of employees, from train drivers to financial controllers, with Rydoo’s innovative business expense solution.
In this short case study, we speak with the CFO of Lineas, Christine Darquenne, about the challenges of managing a European workforce and how Rydoo has helped her to streamline operations and boost productivity by transforming the outdated expense reporting process.
Supporting a European-Wide Workforce
With clients across 62+ countries, Rydoo’s COO understands the importance of providing a business solution that supports today’s on-the-go professional: ‘Travel is an increasingly important part of doing business today.
We ourselves have offices worldwide, so we understand the crucial role that business tools such as Rydoo play in streamlining operations and enabling communication. That is why, from the start, we have built Rydoo to support global teams and the intricacies of global financial models – such as compliancy rules and currencies.
This is a particularly natural fit for companies such as Lineas, where travel is the core offering.’ Lineas was quick to realise how their outdated, manual expense process was particularly problematic when their employees are rarely together in one place: ‘Our team works across Belgium, France, Germany, Prague and the whole of Europe in order to support our travel network.
The previous expense reporting process was impossible. Everyone had to come here, to our main office, and print the Excel sheets, sign the papers and send them to accountants and so on. Then our team had to wait for reimbursements. It just wasn’t working.’
Transforming the Outdated Expense Reporting Process
Christine realised that by going paperless with Rydoo, Lineas would be able to solve this core pain point of managing a remote workforce. ‘Our people didn’t want to put their expenses in the system manually. With Rydoo, we can now automatically scan our expenses on the go – with our smartphones, from the hotel and from any country.
It’s sent straight to the approver, straight into our systems. It’s direct, quick and it saves us a huge amount of time.’ More than that, Lineas noticed the significant benefits of getting rid of the expense report process as a whole – not just the paper aspect. Unlike other expense management platforms, Rydoo actually rethinks and transforms the concept of ‘expense reports’ from scratch, as explained by their CEO: ‘It is not enough to just take old manual processes and digitise them.
That is not innovation. So we rethought the whole expense reporting process from scratch. What is the main benefit of expense management technology? What are we trying to solve?’ ‘We realised from day one that when you can submit each and every expense on the go, old-fashioned ‘expense reports’ no longer make sense. In order to truly innovate, we need to leverage mobile technology to our customer’s advantage. And that means being able to submit, approve, manage and reimburse each individual expense as it happens, in realtime.
You don’t need to add multiple expenses to a report. You don’t need to bulk them together. That just slows down the whole end-to-end process.’ Christine agrees, ‘It’s an advantage for all of our people. Previously we had to wait for the reports. And the user had to wait for the payments. With Rydoo it is very quick. Quick into our systems, but also quicker for reimbursements.
Boosting Productivity with Easy Compliancy & Real-Time Insights
Setting and enforcing expense parameters and compliancy rules can be complicated. Especially with a multi-national workforce. As CFO of Lineas, Christine speaks about how Rydoo has made this aspect of her and her team’s life so much easier: ‘With Rydoo, it’s easy to limit expense parameters within the tool.
It also identifies duplicate expenses for us, which saves a huge amount of time. On paper, this was not possible. It’s quite an advantage for us in finance.’ On top of saving their finance team’s time by reducing the margin for human error, another significant benefit is that Lineas can now access, monitor and analyse their company’s financial data in real-time.
This enables their internal team to work ‘better and faster’ as per Lineas’ core values, and frees up their time to focus on innovation: ‘Everything is visible. It’s transparent. We have access to all the data for all the company, for the department, for the manager and the user. We have full control. It’s a huge benefit.’
Conclusion
Today, technology is empowering the growth of companies into new markets and also blurring geographical boundaries. Smart business tools such as Rydoo are essential to streamlining processes and supporting the traveling workforce.
Innovation is at the core of this growth, and this case study showcases how transforming and automating outdated processes with Rydoo saves Lineas significant time and costs so that they can free up resources to innovate.
Because, ultimately, time is the most vital commodity that smart businesses have at their disposal to compete in today’s global marketplace: ‘Saving time is the best benefit. Time for the user. But for the finance department also. It’s very easy to use. We would definitely recommend it.’