Why it’s so important to track travel expenses in the company?

[Former Member]

Leading business in sustainable way is becoming increasingly relevant today and a “must-have” in the future. One of the main ways for the company to be sustainable is to control its travel expenses and its CO2 emission per travel.

Standard BI content (Data Source 0FI_TV_01, “Travel Expenses: Totals and Receipts” InfoCube) for Travel Expenses provides information only about trips, travelling employees, expenses per trip. But there is no information about trip distances: mileage covered by trip, emission. The information about vehicles used in a trip is not collected, either. So, it is impossible to calculate emission per trips, per employees, per organizational units.

For this purpose, the standard data source 0FI_TV_01 was enhanced with new specific fields, which provide information about kilometers covered in business trip, vehicle type that was in use. New info provider /SKYBFR/FITV was created based on standard 0FITV_C01 cube but with additional dimensions for specific reporting. The information about trip distances and emission is collected from SAP Qualified Partner-Packaged Skybuffer Solution based on SAP Travel Expenses functionality. Google Cloud Platform integration provides distance calculation for different transportation types. Type-dependent distance calculation allows considering every kilometer in transportation expenses according to transportation routes.

On the screen shot below enhanced transformation rules between modified 0FI_TV_01 data source and new cube  /SKYBFR/FITV  are shown.

Based on info provider /SKYBFR/FITV query for CO2 emission, travel distance calculation was build and displayed in Analysis Add-in for Excel.

This report shows CO2 emission and distance in tons depending on different vehicle types per calendar month.

Column at the left side of the Query was build like “hierarchy” of restricted key figures based on different vehicle types (characteristic /SKYBFR/GRTYP (A, B, C, F, R, T..) original field /SKYBFR/GRTYP.

Average CO2 emission per different expense types can be stored in separate table like /SKYBFR/RTE1C_CO and customized through transaction.

	condition 1	condition 2
domestic	0-480km	AND the same country
short haul	0-1500	N/A
medium Haul	1501-4000	N/A
long-haul	>4001	N/A

It can be customized in Data Source functional module extraction code. The characteristic for /SKYBFR/FLCAT (D, S, M, L) is used for restriction, original field /SKYBFR/FLIGHT_CAT.

Restricted key figure looks like at the following screen:



Queries can be visualized like Lumira Dashboard that will allow managers to control their travel expenses on daily basis.



Collecting of information about kilometers covered by different vehicles types during a business trip helps to calculate CO2 emission per travel. From the detail SAP travel reports it’s possible to find information about most expensive and redundant business trips. Based on the reports it’s possible to see how control and saving of travel cost leads to CO2 emission reduction and company sustainability.