Automating corporate reimbursement post 4 decades: V-Guard's story | Part 1

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The V-Guard journey

V-Guard is one of India’s leading electrical & electronic manufacturing companies. Over the past four decades, it has firmly positioned itself as a consumer-focused conglomerate, in the process becoming a common household name across the country. In these years, V-Guard has revamped its product lines and reimagined its internal processes, using new-age tech to increase its competitive edge in the market.

Project- Digitise V-Guard

“From 48% policy violations in 2017 to an 18% reduction in 2018…from a 45-day cycle of manual expense filing and reporting to a 5-day cycle of automated verification – the legacy consumer electronics brand of India has indeed come a long way in modernising and optimising its expense management processes.”

In part 1 of our two-part V-Guard blog series, we explore how the iconic brand accomplished this transformation with Happay after nearly four decades of traditional book-keeping operations.

At a time when companies are focusing on achieving, sustaining and increasing their competitive edge in the market, V-Guard focused on internal enhancements – to empower its employees and achieve unprecedented efficiency through a digital transformation.

For a growing organisation, company policies, reimbursement forms and manual claims create a bottomless void that drains company time and money. To have a gain over competition, it was crucial for V-Guard to embrace new age tech and maximise efficiency. Thus began its journey of transformation.

The need for process automation

V-Guard has about 2,000+ employees, of which about 1,400+ employees incur considerable travel expenses. One of the biggest challenges that the company faced was manually keeping track of all these corporate expenses and assuring smooth overall operations. It urgently needed to reduce the operational time spent on the process by improving the efficiency of approvals processes and setting precise policies.

With a distributed workforce, the glaring need of the hour was for an extensive solution that could keep pace with the company’s aggressive growth – one that could scale at the same massive pace.

The task for Happay

“We were looking out for a process for a long time. In fact, we had a discussion with our systems team, who told us that such a complex solution will definitely take time to develop and is sure to have hiccups”. – John Mathew Sebastian, HR Manager, V-Guard

The major operational challenges that were hindering V-Guard’s progress, and therefore needed to be addressed immediately, were:
• Geographically distributed workforce: The company’s 2,000+ employees were spread across India, and these employees had to go through a 20-day cycle to procure funds. There was an immediate need to cut down the time and effort spent on corporate expense management.
• Manual filing and follow-ups: With the company’s headquarters located in Kochi, employees from all over the country were required to courier reimbursement forms to the HO for approvals. This process was time-consuming and laborious for managers and executives alike.
• Policy violations: As V-Guard scaled up, policy violations increased as well. Thousands of reports were manually processed, making it unsustainable for the finance team to ensure timely and compliant approvals.
• Control over cash disbursed: With the massive pace of business growth and various representatives travelling, there were major expenses that employees were incurring. These expenses needed to be tracked, managed and controlled to avoid leakage and ensure policy compliance.
• Clear expense visibility: A majority of the expenses were marked off as ‘others’, leading to considerable confusion. Far deeper visibility into these expenses was required to ensure permitted use of company finances.

The Happay solution

Happay overhauled and automated V-Guard’s expense management process end to end. The automation drive started in Kochi and extended to all V-Guard offices across India. Over INR 20 crore worth of expenses have so far been transacted through Happay!

But not all was smooth – there were inevitable challenges during this transformation, some very inherent to the nature of Indian-owned businesses. In part 2 of this blog, we share how we beat these challenges and achieved complete automation for V-Guard’s expense management.

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