DataMagic automates areas that cannot be covered by the expense reimbursement system "SAP Concur," while also ensuring future maintainability.

The Skylark Group opened a family restaurant chain in 1970 and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2020. The group operates approximately 3,000 restaurants under a variety of brands, including Western, Chinese, and Japanese cuisine, and aims to reliably meet various needs as lifestyles and ways of enjoying restaurants change with the times. In recent years, the group has been actively investing in digital transformation, promoting initiatives to improve customer convenience and internal productivity.

One of these is the replacement of the expense settlement system. With an eye on responding to the invoice system that will be launched in October 2023, the company has migrated to the cloud service "SAP Concur." In addition, by combining it with the data conversion tool "DataMagic," the process of converting approved expense data into "firm banking data (hereinafter referred to as FB data)" required for account transfers has been automated. This has eliminated the workload of staff and created a system that is easy to maintain.

Benefits of implementation

Although the expense reimbursement system was migrated to SAP Concur,
"FB data generation" is an issue

The Skylark Group operates its flagship restaurant, Gusto, as well as Bamiyan, Yumean, Shabu-Yo, and Jonathan's. In order to always provide "specialty deliciousness" at its restaurants, the group has set up central kitchens in 10 locations across the country, vertically integrating everything from purchasing and manufacturing to logistics and stores, and has also introduced service robots and digital menu books, aiming to create restaurants that are more convenient and comfortable for customers.

Along with improving convenience in stores, the company is also focusing on improving the efficiency and productivity of back-office operations.

"DX is being implemented in a variety of areas, but this time we decided to replace our expense reimbursement system with SAP Concur in order to comply with the invoice system and the Electronic Bookkeeping Act and to promote paperless operations," said Yoshida. One issue that arose was the creation of FB data. When approved expenses are transferred to employees' bank accounts, FB data that conforms to the Zengin format is required, but SAP Concur does not have a function for creating FB data. "Until now, the only option is for accounting staff to manually create FB data using Excel or similar tools. Since FB data could be created in the existing system, migrating to the system would increase the workload. To avoid this, we wondered if we could somehow automate the process," said Kurahashi.

With an eye on future changes and company-specific responses,
Consider tools instead of developing from scratch

Initially, they considered developing the data conversion process from scratch. However, SAP Concur is a cloud service, and the data output format may change. Furthermore, as digital transformation advances in society, it is possible that the Facebook data format may also change. "SAP Concur will be implemented at seven group companies. It's unclear to what extent employee information can be unified and standardized, and individual responses may be required for each company," said Kurahashi. Therefore, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC), which was in charge of implementing SAP Concur, suggested that they consider a tool that could flexibly accommodate future changes and each company's individual formats.

The only basic requirement listed at first was "the ability to automatically create FB data." There are various ways to process the list data of approved expenses output from SAP Concur, such as automating it with an RPA tool or using an ETL tool specialized for processing, but after taking into consideration budget and stability, CTC proposed "DataMagic." The fact that it can be developed in a short period of time because it requires no coding and that it is highly maintainable were also deciding factors, so they quickly decided to implement it.

Implemented DataMagic to develop data conversion processing in a short period of time

Development of DataMagic will begin in January 2023, with testing in March and release in April. "We were worried about whether we would be able to finish developing the FB data conversion in time because we had difficulties sorting out the requirements for SAP Concur, but by using DataMagic we were able to make up for the delay. If we had developed it from scratch, prioritizing completion within the time frame, we would have been limited to just the bare minimum of conversion processing, and wouldn't have had time to consider maintenance when it came to implementation," says Kurahashi.

This time, we used "eExpence," a service provided by CTC that provides unique value-added services for SAP Concur. Expense data approved by SAP Concur was linked to Skylark Holdings' internal environment using eExpence's ERP integration service. FB data was created using DataMagic, and then transferred to financial institutions using the FB transfer process of the shared accounting system. DataMagic is based on data conversion processing, and does not have functions such as execution timing control or email notification when errors occur. These are supplemented by PowerShell, ensuring the necessary functionality overall.

Promoting business efficiency and standardization within the group to create a foundation for further growth

"First of all, we achieved our goal of maintaining the function to automatically create Facebook data, just as before, even after migrating to SAP Concur. Also, by adopting DataMagic, we were able to create a system that can respond immediately to specification changes," says Kurahashi.

Another major benefit is that CTC can now provide comprehensive support, from SAP Concur to creating Facebook data using DataMagic.

Improving productivity across the entire group is an unavoidable theme, and to that end, the company is working to streamline back-office operations and standardize them across the group. This time, the company has been able to standardize the various data handled by DataMagic within the group, but this is only the first phase. "Improving productivity and streamlining operations are the foundation of business growth. On top of that, we will aim for further growth by investing in our stores, which are our key focus, to improve customer convenience and differentiate ourselves from other companies," said Yoshida.

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