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2023 Emburse Champion Awards Winners
2023 Emburse®
Champion Awards Winners
Spotlight 
Customers are at the heart of all we do, and your success helps us continuously improve.
To recognize leaders in spend management who share our commitment to humanizing work,
we created the Emburse Champion Awards.
Across eight categories, Emburse Champions were nominated for their tenacity in eliminating time-consuming tasks to make work better and easier for everyone.
Expense Champion: The Beck Group
Aubree Combs
Humanizing the expense experience while enabling employees, approvers, and finance to focus on more important work.
Through customizations, The Beck Group’s finance team gained greater spend insight as expenses feed directly into custom analytics dashboards. Their employees and approvers also gained efficiency, process satisfaction, and time.
Success highlights:
- Automatically enforced compliance with custom expense rules
- Improved spend visibility, enabling identification and reduction of non-reimbursable expenses
- Leveraged analytics to negotiate better vendor rates and increase use of preferred vendors
We’ve implemented an expense system that essentially runs itself.
Travel Management Champion: Austin Powder Company
Shelton Palmer
Tirelessly optimizing the travel experience for the organization and giving its road warriors the support they deserve.
Austin Powder enhanced their travelers’ experience by providing an intuitive and easy-to-use mobile spend management solution.
Success highlights:
- Enabled mobile connectivity, empowering travelers to submit expenses more frequently
- Utilized built-in rules to improve T&E policy adherence and expedite approvals, resulting in up to 75% faster reimbursements
- Gave travelers significant time back to focus on scaling the business
We’ve saved time on the necessaries so that we can focus on the possibilities.
AP Champion: Dealer Tire
Jennifer Weinberg
Contributing to the organization’s success by eliminating time-consuming AP and invoice tasks while increasing spend controls.
Dealer Tire elevated its invoice process so AP associates can now do what they do best—identify opportunities for savings—rather than moving paper around due to an outdated approval flow.
Success highlights:
- Saved AP up to 40 hours per month with digital access to invoices
- Automated workflows and improved visibility into spend
- Increased controls for invoice processing and approval
We were looking to automate an inefficient process, increase approver controls, and create a reliable database of invoices.
Analytics Champion: International Services, Inc.
Athena Gazikas
Transforming data into actionable insight to help inform business decisions, uncover savings, and improve the organization’s overall financial health.
International Services, Inc. leveraged the transformative power of real-time data to uncover substantial cash and time savings from the previous process.
Success highlights:
- Eliminated human errors around payroll and spend reporting
- Helped approvers review 150% more expense submissions
- Recovered $500K annually with insights delivered from analytics
I’ve gained an entire day back in my work week that was previously dedicated to building reports—now I can instantly access data and run reports in a matter of minutes.
Ultimate Advocate: University of New Mexico
Lorrie Black
Inspiring and educating finance peers with Emburse experiences while becoming an invaluable advocate in our mission to humanize work.
The University of New Mexico eliminated tedious tasks for finance and enabled users with intuitive mobile tools. As a standout advocate, their inspiring story of humanizing work and delivering ROI has been shared widely with fellow finance peers.
Success highlights:
- Saved 35,000 hours annually on expense report processing
- Cut expense processing steps in half and reduced reimbursement time by 75%
- Streamlined workflows and improved visibility with electronic routing and P-Card integrations
We pivoted from a paper mess to a process with significantly less back and forth that keeps users informed regardless of their location.
Ultimate Advisor: PizzaExpress
Olga Pavlova-Grebliauske
Contributing to the Emburse product roadmap’s expansion by sharing valuable insights and feedback.
PizzaExpress contributed valuable feedback and insights that helped shape Emburse product innovations, empowering finance leaders worldwide to take the busy work out of spend management.
Success highlights:
- Digitized expense and AP management
- Drastically improved efficiency through automation
- Used Emburse Cards, PO approvals, and compliance rules to increase spend control
Digitizing processes is the way forward, and we aim to simplify as many financial processes as possible to make work easier for our team and colleagues.
Spend Optimizer of the Year: Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP
Adrienne Kuhel
Positioning the organization for success by leveraging Emburse’s suite of solutions to advance the journey toward optimal spend management.
Embracing the concept of spend optimization, Hinshaw & Culbertson accelerated expense and invoice management and continues to explore additional opportunities to optimize processes, increase cost control, and support the firm’s growth.
Success highlights:
- Reduced invoice processing time by 90%
- Expedited client billing with card integrations
- Enabled higher-value AP work
Emburse’s mobile capabilities help me easily assist employees without having to log into my computer, which gives me time back with my family.
Humanizer of the Year: Hall & Wilcox
Melissa Grant
Expertly leveraging a combination of Emburse solutions to optimize value, improve the organization’s financial health, and enable employees to focus on what matters most.
Hall & Wilcox proactively seeks technology that helps drive efficiency, minimize repetitive tasks, and enable employees to focus on more interesting, rewarding work. This people-first mentality perpetually fuels the team’s drive to complete tasks better, faster, and smarter.
Success highlights:
- Transformed AP into a 100% paperless process and saved the team 20 hours per month
- Fueled scalability, supporting 2x the volume of transactions without requiring new headcount
- Made work more meaningful as menial tasks were automated and simplified
Emburse’s goal to humanize work aligns with our purpose to enable our clients, our people, and our communities to thrive, and is interwoven into how we work daily.
Honorable mentions
Emburse customers achieve amazing things every day. While we only had room for eight Emburse Champions, we heard so many success stories of finance leaders driving meaningful change.
We’ve been able to scale with ease, growing headcount by nearly 50%, while reducing the reporting time frame by roughly 30% and reimbursement time by 50%.
Erik Keener
Vanessa Jong
Emburse helps us support a flexible, hybrid work from-home model, improving employee engagement and work-life balance. This improves employee morale and allows for more teamwork and collaboration.
We’ve gained more visibility and control of expenses; we can now assign project-specific budgets on credit cards through Emburse to avoid excess spending.
Terri Jeffrey-Barker
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