SAP Travel Management accompanies all the processes involved in handling trips. It provides integrated functions and links these to the settlement, taxation and payment processes. Travel management covers the request, planning and booking of trips, as well as the settlement of travel expenses and the transfer of settlement results to other business function areas. The integration of SAP Travel Management guarantees the benefits of synergies that increase efficiency and reduce process costs.

To ensure an optimum use of SAP Travel Management, an analysis of the trip processes used in the enterprise should be made. What is the approval workflow for business trips? Which trip rules have to be considered for which employee groups? Do trip rules first have to be defined? Do agreements with external travel service providers exist that have to be taken into consideration? How is the reimbursement of costs process implemented and which organizational units are involved?

Based on an analysis you must systematically derive which business tasks you can conduct using SAP Travel Management that will increase efficiency and which subcomponents you will need to achieve this.

According to the individual requirements and the organizational structure of the enterprise the following three areas of SAP Travel Management can be combined flexibly:

• Travel Request
• Travel Planning
• Travel Expenses

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Travel Expenses is the anchor component. This component can be used completely independently of Travel Request and Travel Planning.

You can use the current release of SAP Travel Management independently of the remaining R/3 application environment. The SAP ALE technology (Application Link Enabling) provides the necessary communication bridges to R/3 applications with earlier releases. You therefore only have to maintain the data once.

In the Travel Planning subcomponent Travel Management accesses an external reservation system connected to R/3 to carry out the queries on available travel services and to book the selected services. The reservation system currently available is the AMADEUS Global Travel Distribution system.

To support a task-related use of the system you can assign users (beginning with R/3 Release 4.6) different predefined or individually adjustable roles or activity groups. The relevant users can then only access those functions in SAP Travel Management that are relevant for the completion of their business tasks.

Due to the integration with Payroll and Financial Accounting, the data from Travel Planning and Travel Expenses can be transferred to these components for precise objects as it occurs.

Another advantage of SAP Travel Management is the integration of the three subcomponents Travel Request, Travel Planning and Travel Expenses. Thus, for example, all three objects use the same HR master data.

The following diagram illustrates the integrated functions of Travel Planning and Travel Expenses:

With the SAP Travel Management application component, you can perform all business travel processes from Travel Request and Travel Planning to Travel Expenses and the transfer of travel expenses to other business function areas efficiently and reliably.

SAP Travel Management is an international standard that can be set up to meet country-specific requirements. You can also use special country versions that already contain the national statutory and tax-based regulations.

As part of the SAP Employee Self Services (ESS) the service Travel Expenses supports the decentralized processing of travel expenses so that the travelers can enter their trip and receipt data themselves and on their own authority. To do this they do not have to leave their workplace and can make their entries via Internet or Intranet. Due to the offline use that this solution offers a traveler can make the necessary entries on the road or from home.