Project Description

Identifying the opportunity

When active in the field, expense management is not always top of mind. The overarching behavior is to quickly take a picture of a receipt and move on, or pocket a receipt and deal with it later. The process is then completed while working from home on Friday or nights and weekend past work hours. Submitting expenses is for consultants an important part of their client billables, and for the rest of business travelers, getting reimbursed for out of pocket travel expenditures is something to track closely.

 

Defining the solution

Our objective is to launch an iOS native app that allows capture of expenses on the go. By providing a quick and easy method to capture expenses, organize them, and submit them for reimbursement requirements from consultants are met. Having offline capabilities allows the app to be used on a return flight home and in areas with poor connectivity.

 

Setting up overall goals

The following business goals were defined to ensure funding within the organization. Creating open APIs and an expense management solution that could be used by our internal workforce were determining factors.

  1. Deliver a native app that will meet the requirements of consultants and frequent business travelers.
  2. Deliver open ION APIs to enable smooth data flow in and out of XM for other/external systems.
  3. Deliver the foundation for the next generation of native mobile experience for Infor.

 

Adding features that ensure immediate adoption from the user base

It was determined that in order to ensure adoption for initial rollout the following set of features needed to be included. These features were then mapped to the aggressive delivery timeline scheduled for late December. The first release will include:

  • Touch ID and user name/password authentication
  • Capture expenses on the go – including the ability to attach images taken in app, from iPhone photo library and from XM receipt library and PDF from email
  • Support for a subset of expense types: Meals (individual and group), allowances/per diem, train/rail, taxi, parking/tolls
  • Import of corporate credit card transactions
  • Submit expense reports
  • Run business rules validation
  • Native and in-app notifications of errors and incoming credit card transactions
  • Set up analytics to measure specific in-app behavior

The first release of the app will only be adopted by a smaller segment of the XM user base, however it will be immediately followed by Infor users.
In R2 and beyond, the goal is to support additional expense types along with business rules validation.

 

Listing clear KPIs to hold the product, and our work, accountable

The main product KPI is adoption and usage. The percentages were determined after conferring with multiple stakeholders of the project and were agreed upon.

  • Weekly usage should reach 20-30% adoption across our client’s user base on roll-out, we expect the adoption rates to double through 2018 and reach full adoption in 2019 on iOS as additional expense types are added.
  • Achieve an average score above 4 on a 5 point rating system, good to excellent (from 75% of client user base that is part of the roll-out)
  • Expose at least 50% of API end-points that are currently inaccessible to enable the required functionality for iOS native apps
  • Adoption of open APIs by other systems internal to Infor
  • Performance cannot exceed 30 seconds per server call not to impede the user’s positive perception of the app