Irdeto, world leader in digital security, digitises its expense management

With nearly 50 years of expertise in security, Irdeto’s software security technology and cyber services protect over 5 billion devices and applications for some of the world’s best-known brands.

As the world leader in digital platform security, Irdeto is an innovative and forward-thinking company. Yet, some internal processes remained unchallenged and not updated to reflect internally what they represented externally.

Challenge

Irdeto’s expense management process, though online, was extremely manual. All expenses had to be entered manually in their ERP system, Microsoft Dynamics. The expense submission could only be done at the office. Receipts needed to 
be scanned one by one, then entered into Microsoft Dynamics, filling in all information manually.

To stimulate innovation and critical thinking within Irdeto, regular “Hack Days” are hosted for employees to challenge current processes and find new service ideas. During one “Hack Day”, Pierre Fauvel, Financial Controller for Irdeto Americas, volunteered to find a new solution for their expense processes. He later became the project manager for the global rollout of Rydoo.

A heavy traveller himself, Pierre was regularly frustrated by — in his own words — the painful and slow process. Pierre averaged the time spent on expenses after each trip from 45 min to 1 hour. An unacceptable, lengthy process that affects working hours and frustrates employees.

“We always knew internally that there is something out there that would be better than Microsoft Dynamics to handle our expenses.”

Pierre Fauvel, Financial controller

A mobile cloud solution

Irdeto’s heaviest spenders are away from the office most of the time. All tasks involving logging into Microsoft Dynamics were left to the last minute because a VPN connection was required, and the tool was not user-friendly. The solution Irdeto was looking for should allow users and approvers to take any action on their mobile phones: enter expenses, submit, approve, control, etc.

"We wanted to free up people’s time. If they are in a restaurant, they can take a picture of their receipt and immediately send it for approval."

Pierre Fauvel, Financial controller

OCR technology

Getting away from manual entries was a must for Irdeto. One advantage of implementing a mobile, on-the-go solution is reducing manual tasks for employees as much as possible.

“The capacity for the tool to recognise elements and pre-populate the information is a big time saver, and it’s one of the elements that we liked about Rydoo when doing the demos.”

Pierre Fauvel, Financial controller

Rydoo’s OCR technology automatically extracts the date, amount, currency, and merchant from receipts. Users are only asked to assign the receipt to a cost centre before submitting it for approval.

Kill the expense report

Introducing a new tool in every company can be challenging — at Irdeto, they saw it as an opportunity to review and challenge their internal processes.

“What really attracted us to Rydoo is that you get out of the expense report process. I go to the cafeteria, I take a picture of my receipt and submit it.”

Pierre Fauvel, Financial controller

This change in process and mentality was supported by a team that strongly believed in the advantages it would bring to the company: instant submission of expenses, a shorter cycle from expense to reimbursement, a real-time overview of company spending, etc.

2-way integration

Irdeto deployed Rydoo in 9 countries covering the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The project was led by finance teams in each region and overseen by the Finance Controller for the Americas.

Thanks to the great collaboration between the Irdeto project team and Rydoo, the rollout across all 9 countries took 8 weeks, including a full Microsoft Dynamics integration.

With the 2-way integration with Microsoft Dynamics, all users were imported into Rydoo, and the approval flows and assignments were automated. This is a real-time integration, meaning that any change in Microsoft Dynamics will be automatically applied to Rydoo.

“The main challenge was with the phased rollout; we had to train some approvers whose country was not yet deployed, but managers were excited about seeing the tool before it was released in their country.”

Pierre Fauvel, Financial controller

Irdeto's key results