ZS is a professional services consulting firm that works side by side with companies to help develop and deliver products that drive customer value and company results. It leverages its deep industry expertise, leading-edge analytics, technology and strategy to create solutions that work in the real world. With more than 35 years of experience and 7,000-plus ZSers in more than 25 offices worldwide, it is passionately committed to helping companies and their customers thrive.
In this guest blog, Parikshit Bhatt, Associate Consultant at ZS, explains how the organization implemented Emburse Solution Administrator to help with helpdesk support and prioritization.
ZS Associates has more than 7,600 employees, and we process between 8,000-10,000 expense reports every month. We have a complex organizational structure with 25+ offices spanning 13 countries, which has its own set of challenges - multiple currencies, country-specific regulations, and tax systems requiring unique system configurations.
With such a complex system, we had 25-30 helpdesk cases per month, resulting in continuous case prioritization and follow-ups and complex rule building and compliance testing supported by limited internal resources. As a result, change development and deployment took four weeks on average, resulting in delays and frustration on both ends. These issues continued to be a pain point for our employees and finance team, and we knew there had to be a better way.
Our customer success manager approached us about Emburse Solution Administrator (ESA) - a service package available for Chrome River EXPENSE and INVOICE customers. It leverages a team of Emburse’s solution administrators, who are familiar with our business requirements to provide additional consulting, optimize our configuration, drive new feature adoption, and administer our system through back-end configuration changes for the deployed user population.
We were originally unsure of the value that ESA would bring, but it quickly became clear that it was well worth the investment. With ESA, we receive priority support and faster, smoother change request deployments, saving our team a significant amount of time.
Our ESA consultant is familiar with our business requirements, and provides us with valuable personalized support, saving the ZS team about six hours per week. They manage things like ongoing case prioritization and clean-up, allowing our team to focus on other high-priority tasks. The ESA team has become an extension of our team, assisting with custom configuration, rule building, and testing - and their expertise allows for a much more efficient experience with Chrome River.
We’ve seen some significant results since adopting ESA. Our monthly caseload has been reduced by half, and change turnaround time has gone from an average of four weeks to four days - that’s 600% faster!