Client Spotlight - Astec
Astec Achieves Nearly 100% Corporate Card Spend

A Powerful Company Transforms T&E Management
Astec is a world-leading supplier of electronic power conversion products headquartered in Carlsbad, California with operations and facilities in North America, Europe, and Asia. The company features a broad range of AC/DC and DC/DC power supplies and provides power conversion solutions for the computer, business systems, communications, and industrial markets.

Astec is a wholly owned subsidiary of Emerson, a diversified, multinational company established in 1890, and serving an international customer base. Astec employees travel widely and the management wanted to transform a limited and inefficient manual T&E process into a powerful, cost effective system that would ease the burden on travelers and capture company-wide data for managers.

A Business Challenge
Astec is a sophisticated company with design and production operations on three continents and distributors in more than 30 countries. The company's manual process for T&E capture was time consuming and inefficient. Employees spent long hours completing expense reports and typically waited weeks to be reimbursed.  Currency conversion was cumbersome and error-prone and paper archives made record retrieval difficult.

Astec needed to implement Gelco's responsive, user-friendly T&E solution to:

  • Increase the speed and accuracy of the expense report process
  • Shorten reimbursement cycle time
  • Simplify currency conversion in expense reporting
  • Improve SOX compliance
  • Eliminate paper storage
  • Reduce processing costs

The Gelco Solution helps Astec streamline for efficiency
Gelco's automated solution has transformed Astec's T&E expense management process.

Gelco's ExpenseLink has enabled Astec to:

  • Reduce expense report filing time from hours to minutes
  • Save time and eliminate errors with automatic currency conversion
  • Reimburse employees within 3 days of filing an expense report
  • Provide fast, direct deposit for all reimbursements

Gelco's Reporting & Analysis provides a large selection of reports that provide visibility into Astec's travel spend across the company.  "Gelco's reports give me everything I need," said Jeff Noble, Project Manager.  "Pending Approval Reports" have accelerated the approval process, "Charge Card Utilization" has encouraged corporate card use, and the red flag alerts feature lets managers and employees know instantly where there are problems or discrepancies.  "There's no longer any guesswork," said Noble.

The Gelco Solution helps Astec improve SOX compliance
 Gelco's Receipt & Audit services have significantly improved Astec's SOX compliance. "Before implementing the Gelco solution, our accounting staff had to audit 100% of reports. Now we save a lot of time, our employees never get shortchanged, and we know we are in compliance. We've been through a number of audits since we implemented Gelco without a single problem," said Noble. Astec has been able to eliminate its paper files while increasing managers' access to vital data.

Gelco's CardLink solution helps Astec achieve nearly 100% corporate card spend
Astec has also benefited from Gelco's innovative CardLink solution.  CardLink enables automated customized itemization of corporate card charges and direct payment to corporate card companies. With CardLink, Astec has eliminated errors and duplicate entries and increased corporate card spend dramatically, which eliminates late fees and increases opportunities for rebates and other incentives.

Gelco has helped Astec turn an unwieldy, inefficient process into an effective mechanism for saving money, increasing employee productivity, improving compliance, and enhancing employee satisfaction.

Unexpected benefits
 Astec has also realized a number of unexpected benefits from the Gelco solution. The company has successfully:

  • Held down increases in its accounts payable staff while growing their employee base
  • Seamlessly integrated its general ledger with the Gelco T&E solution saving significant accounting time reconciling and resolving discrepancies
  • Implemented VAT recovery
  • Gained visibility into non-financial travel policy issues
"The Gelco solution makes a huge difference for a global business like ours," said John Hardy, VP of Human Resources for Astec Power.