Enterprise SaaS · Mobile

SAP

SAP Concur is where enterprise travel and expense runs. SAP paid $8.3 billion for it in 2014. From Prague, I led mobile design for two of its products: ExpenseIt, an OCR app that extracts payment data from a receipt photo, and Concur Request, a procurement platform the Prague squad built from zero. Two designers, three dev squads, design teams in Paris and Seattle.

Client: SAP Concur
Year: 2017 to 2018
Role: Senior UX Designer
Duration: 13 months

Scope

Mobile Product Design

Greenfield Product (0 to 1)

Design Ops / Intake System

Junior Designer Mentorship

Team

Two-person design team in Prague (myself and one junior designer) supporting three active development squads. Weekly syncs with design teams in Paris and Seattle; regular roadmap alignment with the VP of Product.

Challenge

ExpenseIt users were hitting two walls. Single-image capture couldn't handle multi-page invoices, so travelers were working around it. And even with OCR doing the extraction, the full submission flow was taking several minutes per expense. The target was under 60 seconds. Request had no prior art. The Prague squad was building the procurement workflow from scratch: catalog browsing, purchase requests, approval routing, invoice matching, straight-through payment release. Clean brief, complex cross-functional reality with stakeholders across three continents. Internally, two designers were covering three squads with no visibility into what was queued or in progress. Stakeholders could walk up and ask for a design that day, with no honest way to respond.

ExpenseIt mobile flow: multi-page receipt capture, gallery selection, OCR expense detail, and report submit — ExpenseIt end to end. Multi-page capture, receipt selection, OCR extraction, and submit on the March report. The target was under 60 seconds from photo to submitted expense.

Approach

For ExpenseIt, I embedded daily with the PM and dev team in an Agile-Scrum setup. Research confirmed the two blockers. The design work focused on enabling multi-page document capture and compressing capture-to-submission under 60 seconds. For Request, I led design end to end and mentored the junior designer through execution. Weekly cross-office syncs with Paris and Seattle kept the UX consistent with the broader Concur ecosystem. Regular VP of Product sessions kept the roadmap grounded in business priorities. The internal fix was a Jira-based intake and prioritization board. All three squads submitted requests through one place. Workload became visible to everyone. Conversations shifted from 'can you do this today' to 'where does this fit in the queue.'

Jira intake board UX process diagram beside the Prague design office — The Jira intake board that replaced hallway requests. Unsorted through Closed, every squad could see what was queued, in progress, or blocked. Office shot from the Prague design floor.

Outcome

ExpenseIt shipped multi-page receipt capture and a redesigned submission flow aimed at under 60 seconds. Concur Request launched as a new mobile app: catalog, request, approval routing, and straight-through payment on invoice match. The intake system changed how design integrated with all three squads for the rest of the engagement.

Concur Request mobile screens: trip booking, request list with approval states, and trip detail forms — Concur Request shipped from Prague. Trip search and booking, active request list with approval states, and the detail forms the squad built greenfield.

01< 60 secTarget: capture to submitted expense

022 productsExpenseIt and Concur Request, both led

030 to 1Concur Request built greenfield in Prague

043 officesPrague, Paris, Seattle coordinated weekly

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