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New Concur service lets companies monitor employees traveling in risky areas

By Rachel Lerman, The Seattle Times
Published: March 19, 2017, 5:13am

When a truck deliberately drove into crowds celebrating Bastille Day last summer in Nice, France, 11 Concur employees were traveling for business in the city. Company President Mike Eberhard quickly learned two more employees were vacationing in the area.

Within an hour of the attack, Eberhard had received a full report on the employees’ whereabouts. Within three hours, all had been contacted and checked in as “safe.”

Bellevue-based Concur, which develops and sells software allowing companies to manage business and travel expenses, announced Wednesday that it will provide that same type of monitoring service to customers.

It already offers a risk-alerts system that notifies customers of incidents that could affect travel around the world. Now it is expanding that system to allow customers to sign up for a service that monitors traveling employees and reaches out to them in the case of an incident.

“There’s really a growing concern for traveling employees’ safety,” Eberhard said. “The places we may have previously considered safe have had incidents. Now it’s best to assume that all locations can have risk.”

The service, Concur Risk Messaging, allows companies to quickly find and reach out to employees who are traveling when anything from a natural disaster to a terrorist attack to bad weather occurs. The program integrates into existing Concur travel and expense systems.

It also includes an option for round-the-clock monitoring services, provided by new Concur partner, HX Global, an international travel-assistance company. When an incident occurs, the monitoring system will locate an employee and reach out to them via email or text message. If the employee doesn’t respond quickly, an HX Global worker will make calls to try to reach them.

Concur assigns a level of risk to each incident, finds and contacts affected employees and delivers a full report to the employer within an hour.

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