SCHOTT eliminates 80% of the expense burden with Rydoo 

Imagine managing expense reimbursements for thousands of employees across 30 countries — each with unique rules, systems, and demands. For SCHOTT AG, a pioneering global technology group with over 130 years of innovation in advanced glass and glass-ceramic solutions, this was their everyday reality.

With products critical to industries such as healthcare, electronics, and automotive, SCHOTT’s people frequently travel worldwide to drive their vision forward. But behind this global success lay a significant internal challenge: their finance teams faced overwhelming manual workloads, delayed reimbursements, and complex compliance requirements. 

SCHOTT needed a solution as innovative and reliable as its own products. Enter Rydoo: a smart, intuitive expense management platform designed to simplify processes, automate tasks, and integrate effortlessly with existing systems.

Could Rydoo quickly simplify SCHOTT’s complex global workflows and significantly reduce manual workload?
The answer: a remarkable 80% reduction in accounting burdens and a process implemented in record time, transforming complexity into simplicity, delays into rapid reimbursements, and frustration into clarity. 

Here’s how SCHOTT AG revolutionised its expense management, and how Rydoo made it happen.

During an internal evaluation process, SCHOTT identified a major pain point within the finance team: excessive manual work when processing travel reimbursements. This created significant inefficiencies, including delays in reimbursements, especially problematic for those with substantial upfront travel costs.

The solution was clear: SCHOTT needed a smart expense management solution that was intuitive for employees, addressed the accounting team’s challenges and was cost-effective. It also needed to effortlessly integrate with SAP S/4 HANA to reduce manual data entry and improve visibility.

With frequent travellers spread across 16 global sales offices, any chosen solution had to accommodate this global distribution and perfectly fit into existing processes.

SCHOTT’s final non-negotiable? Record-time implementation across all entities. With 4,000 employees in Germany and 17,000 worldwide, lengthy implementation was not an option. Longer implementation meant higher costs, and that’s where Rydoo stood out from other solutions.

SCHOTT collaborated closely with the HR department to quickly upload employee details — including names, email, employee ID and other organisational details — using Rydoo’s bulk-upload feature.

Each employee’s designated manager was automatically set as their expense approver, regardless of location, aligning smoothly with SCHOTT’s existing hierarchy. This also ensured an organised and consistent approval process.

The speed of implementation was particularly notable, with successful rollouts in global offices, including Taiwan, Korea, China, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Switzerland, and across other European countries. In Malaysia, when a custom-built tool was suddenly discontinued, SCHOTT switched entirely to Rydoo in just a few days.

To make the process simple for all employees, SCHOTT’s team organised kick-off sessions and provided tutorial videos. During the rollout, users were guided through setting up their expense types. However, minimal training was needs since, in Claudia’s words, Rydoo’s intuitive design makes using it “very self-explanatory”.

SCHOTT can easily customise Rydoo to handle unique regional requirements, such as specific allowances and tax rates or add special rules — for example, employees from Singapore or Malaysia travelling to colder countries like Germany received allowances to buy suitable clothing. This customisation improved visibility for managers, helping them clearly understand employee expenses and needs, which improved team communication.

Previously, employees submitted lengthy consolidated reports with up to 25 different expenses, which had to be individually verified, causing delays if even one receipt was missing. With Rydoo, each expense is submitted individually, dramatically simplifying the process.

This change was particularly impactful in regions with strict legal requirements. For example:

• In the UK, employees must claim expenses as soon as they occur. This prevents situations where employees face long reimbursement delays, such as when travel visas or pre-paid expenses are claimed months after the initial payment.
• In China, employees must provide an official tax invoice for domestic hotel stays. Previously, if this document was missing, controllers had to hold back the entire expense report until the paperwork was received.

Rydoo’s flexible system has significantly improved SCHOTT’s expense control process, leading to quicker reimbursement and less frustration for employees and controllers, reducing bottlenecks and improving transparency. 

Before Rydoo, processing hundreds of monthly expenses represented between 50 and 80 hours of manual work for SCHOTT’s team. Submitting an expense alone would take several minutes. With Rydoo’s automation capabilities, this workload has been significantly reduced, giving the shared services team more time for valuable tasks.  

Rydoo seamlessly integrates with SAP’s accounting software. The integration uses predefined expense categories, tax codes, and GL accounts to automatically transfer expense data from Rydoo to SCHOTT’s accounting system every night, removing the need for manual entry.

Despite the increased number of individual submissions, overall efficiency improved substantially. SCHOTT estimates that 80% of the accounting workload has been eliminated. 

SCHOTT AG’s adoption of a smart expense management solution demonstrates how digital transformation can have a great impact on day-to-day operations. Rydoo simplified processes, reduced manual tasks, improved visibility, and met global compliance needs. 

The results? Faster reimbursements, improved manager insights, and a smoother, more efficient process that continues to deliver value for SCHOTT AG’s international operations.