SAP is expanding its cloud offerings with a number of applications. One is SAP Travel OnDemand. PAC had a chance to look at it.

Travel management is a task many companies have to perform. However, not every company has a proper solution for it in place. The challenge with travel management is that you have to consider a number of regulatory requirements in different countries. In addition, many employees within a company are involved in travel-related processes: those who travel and those who have to approve and monitor travel activities, costs and travel expenses relating to projects.

Travel OnDemand was developed on the SAP Business ByDesign platform, runs in the SAP Cloud and provides a web front end and a mobile interface. According to SAP, the solution is available in 16 countries. This includes language support but more importantly, compliance with country-specific regulations, among them the sunshine act for the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S.

PAC’s view

HR processes such as travel management belong to the low-hanging fruit in the SaaS business. This is one of the reasons why there already are several SaaS solutions on the market, including Workday, Concur from the U.S. and HRworks from Germany. With SAP Travel OnDemand, SAP is entering a promising market segment, but it will have to show that it can do better than the solutions that exist today.

We expect that SaaS solutions for travel management will attract ERP customers that do not have a proper solution in place yet. SAP can win deals if it can provide a cost-effective and fast ERP integration.

A point solution like travel management that addresses a common problem is likely to be welcomed by SAP customers. One other argument is that mobile support is available without the burden of building up a mobile infrastructure.

Theoretically, SAP has the chance to chase for customers outside its ERP universe. A PeopleSoft integration is in the works. We will see if others follow.