How Tekion built a more global, connected T&E program

Region

NORAM: North America

Headquarters

Pleasanton, California

Industry

Tech

Products Used

• Navan Business Travel
• Navan Expense
• Navan Travel Payments

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Tekion provides cloud-based services for automotive dealerships and OEMs. Its teams work across the United States, India, the UK, Europe, and Asia, with implementation and integration employees traveling to customer sites for much of each month. Leadership, engineering, executive assistants, and customer-facing teams also rely heavily on travel.

Amy Lynn Newman, Tekion's director of global procurement and T&E operations, oversees indirect procurement as well as the travel and events function. For her, the T&E program needed to support a growing, global business while giving employees and administrators a simpler way to book, manage, and report on travel and expenses.

Before Navan

Before Navan, Tekion used American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) alongside Concur for booking and expenses. As Tekion’s travel program expanded globally, Amy Lynn Neumann, Director of Global Procurement and T&E Operations, felt the setup became increasingly difficult to manage. She described challenges with accessing local travel options, maintaining visibility into employee travel, and receiving timely support and reporting.

For Neumann, the need was clear: Tekion needed a solution that treated global access, support, and reporting as core requirements — not exceptions.

“

AmexGBT was very difficult to reach outside of the U.S. It was a lot of manual booking, which then from a duty of care perspective, meant I didn’t know where employees were.

Amy Lynn Neumann

Director of Global Procurement and T&E Operations

Why Tekion chose Navan

Neumann had previously implemented Navan at another company and knew the platform could support a more modern travel and expense program. At Tekion, the decision centered on whether the solution could serve employees in their local context: in their language, in their currency, and in their time zone. “We’re a global company, and we wanted our travel to be represented globally,” shares Neumann.

The team chose Navan to unify travel and expense while improving the day-to-day experience for frequent travelers, executive assistants, and the small team responsible for oversight. The goal was not simply to replace a booking tool; it was to create one operating layer for booking, approvals, reporting, and support.

Implementation and change management

Tekion began implementation in early February and went live in April 2026. The full effort took approximately 12 weeks, including user acceptance testing and a beta phase. Rather than launch everywhere at once, the team used a phased rollout:

• A pilot group tested the experience before the broader launch.
• The U.S. rollout went live first, followed a few weeks later by Canada.
• India was brought into the broader program in stages while Tekion and Brex worked toward a corporate card option that could support local reimbursements.

That structure gave the team space to make adjustments before scaling. 

Neumann described change management as one of the most difficult parts of introducing any new system. Tekion addressed that challenge as part of the rollout with a high-touch support model that kept questions moving and made the implementation feel shared across teams.

The team held weekly working sessions, adding meetings when travel or expense needed focused attention. A dedicated Navan Slack channel gave Tekion a place to raise urgent issues and recurring patterns, while an in-office Navan representative in India answered questions locally during onboarding. Travelers could also reach live or in-app support around the clock, including outside U.S. business hours. “Navan has a presence in India. For our team there, it’s incredibly helpful. It just spoke a lot to the company, customer service, and really helping us be successful,” noted Neumann.

“

By doing a phased rollout, we were able to test, make adjustments, and then roll it out to the entire U.S. Having Navan there to answer questions and help with troubleshooting made a big difference in confidence early on.

Amy Lynn Neumann

Director of Global Procurement and T&E Operations

The new operating model

With travel and expense in one place, Neumann and her team gained a more immediate view of activity. Approvals, reviews, questions, and reporting could happen from the same dashboard, whether she was at her computer or traveling with her phone.

Travelers can rebook through the app, receive automated updates, or use live chat when plans change. Point-of-sale receipt capture and transaction-level approvals reduce the buildup of large, delayed expense reports. Tekion can configure policy parameters so transactions are auto-approved, flagged, or routed for review, while executive assistants can manage upgrades, personal cards, and airline points in the same workflow for C-suite travelers.

The result is a shift from reactive administration to a more connected operating model. Tekion can use travel patterns to inform preferred-airline and hotel decisions, while the T&E team spends less time waiting for reports or reconciling disconnected data.

Tekion’s future with Navan

Tekion's early feedback was positive: employees were generally happy, and remaining questions centered on how to get the most from the tool rather than disruptions to business continuity. The implementation also gave the organization a practical path to reduce manual work over time.

Next, Tekion is focused on bringing India onto a corporate card program, refining the balance between system-led auditing and human review, and supporting a company preparing for continued growth and a future public-company environment.

For organizations modernizing T&E, Neumann's advice is straightforward: “look for a platform that is global in practice, easy for employees and administrators, and strong enough to make the organization look more professional from the inside and out.”