From 2 months to 2 days: ABB Optical's Sunshine Act compliance breakthrough
“Compared to our previous vendor, Ramp gave us true transaction-level granularity, making it possible for me to audit thousands of transactions in record time.”
Director of Compliance & Privacy Officer, ABB Optical
See insights on how 50,000+ customers spent on Ramp in 2025
For ABB Optical, the decision to replace SAP Concur was straightforward: Ramp eliminated per-transaction fees, consolidated fragmented spend tools, and delivered real-time visibility that legacy systems can’t support.
However, ABB Optical operates under strict healthcare regulations at massive scale. As one of the nation’s largest optical distributors, every meal with a healthcare provider, every consulting fee, and every dollar spent in the field must be tracked with accuracy and precision for U.S. Federal Open Payments (Sunshine Act) and state transparency reporting. With thousands of transactions flowing through a dispersed field organization every month, accuracy isn't optional. It's existential.
Ramp had already launched Sunshine Act compliance features earlier in 2025, which helped solve for pieces of the U.S. Open Payments data requirements. But Lisa Norris needed more—a full data integration that fully solved for both local/state and federal transparency reporting. Managing millions in monthly spend across hundreds of field reps, she surfaced what every enterprise compliance leader knows: provider verification at scale can't rely on workarounds or jumping between systems. At this scale, manual processes don't just slow things down. They break.
Lisa shared her feedback directly with Ramp's product team. Rather than treating it as a feature request, Ramp saw an opportunity to redefine how transparency reporting should work at scale. They tapped Lisa and MedPro Systems—the industry's leading provider of healthcare practitioner data validation—to co-create a purpose-built solution. The three organizations then mapped the full compliance lifecycle and embedded MedPro's authoritative healthcare provider database directly into Ramp's spend workflow. The result: Ramp’s spend management platform—with transparency compliance thoughtfully embedded into everyday workflows—turned audits that once consumed months into work completed in days.
When compliance systems create more risk than they prevent
Before Ramp, ABB Optical relied on Concur for expense management to provide data needed for transparency reporting. On paper, Concur handled expense compliance automatically. However, in reality, it created blind spots, which in turn created a ton of manual audit work that kept Lisa up at night.
The fundamental problem: Concur treated expense compliance as a checkbox, not a workflow. In practice, this made many expenses error-prone. A meal shared between a healthcare provider and a sales consultant, for example, was often grouped as HCP spend because the expense wasn’t submitted with the right attendee types. Without visibility into these reporting errors until year-end, the correction process unbearably time-consuming and difficult.
"I depended entirely on Concur to give me correct information—but I had no way of being alerted in advance of an issue in order to verify it,” Lisa explains. “Costs weren’t broken down by attendee, and because there was no Compliance oversight simultaneous to Management review, I didn’t see transactions until year-end. If something was wrong, the money was already spent, and there was no way to fix it.”
As a compliance team of one managing millions in monthly spend, Lisa was forced to audit quarterly (not monthly) because reviewing 10,000+ transactions took two months, toggling constantly between Concur’s platform, manual download reports + receipts, only to discover policy violations after the fact. For regulated life sciences companies, this isn't just inefficient—it's unacceptable. Compliance bottlenecks kill velocity. Shadow spend creates liability. Lisa refused to accept that trade-off.
Customer-led product development: building compliance into the workflow
When Ramp’s team sat down with Lisa, they started by learning her compliance process end to end—from mobile receipt capture to final Federal CMS and state reporting—and then built those requirements directly into the spend workflow.
"Ramp translated what I had in my brain into a clean workflow," Lisa says. "They took a step back to understand the whole compliance process, not just financial transactions. We mapped requirements from A to Z, fine-tuned the solution, and kept iterating."
What emerged was a platform purpose-built for regulated operations:
1. Embedded transparency reporting with transaction-level clarity
While legacy expense software like Concur can capture attendee details, they typically rely on manual entry and user-selected attendee types—meaning HCP classification depends on rep input and system configuration.
Ramp embeds compliance directly into the transaction, making it seamless for users to log spend and select providers from verified MedPro data at the time of purchase.
2. Native MedPro Systems integration
By embedding MedPro’s trusted healthcare provider data directly into Ramp, ABB Optical eliminated the most failure-prone step in aggregate spend compliance: manual provider verification.
MedPro Systems provides the verified, comprehensive provider data that life sciences companies depend on for federal and state transparency reporting. Ramp's integration embeds this authoritative data directly into the expense workflow—field reps search and select verified providers from MedPro's database as they submit expenses, with no separate login or system switching. Users see the provider's NPI number, state license, and verification details instantly for every HCP, on every transaction. Plus, MedPro's data in Ramp seamlessly exports to the MedPro ComplianceReportingID transparency platform.
"With Concur, I had no insights to see provider information associated with each transaction," Lisa says. However, "with Ramp, I can see what field reps are entering in real time, and the provider data feeds directly into my reports. The transparency of these transactions is game-changing—it’s the difference between hoping data is right and knowing it is."
3. Mobile-first capture and AI-powered policy enforcement
Ramp's mobile-first design lets ABB Optical's field team log expenses the moment they happen—receipt photo, provider selection, expense categorization —done. 90% of the field team now submits expenses via mobile, and affidavit usage for missing receipts has dropped 85-90%. Using Ramp's AI policy review feature, transactions under $10 can be automatically approved, purchases outside policy parameters get flagged, and vendor & staff meals are separated from provider meals—a critical distinction for Sunshine Act categorization.
Compliance is now built into the workflow, invisible to field reps but delivering complete visibility to Lisa.
"The AI features have been super helpful. Ramp reads my policy and automatically approves anything under $10, so I don't have to review them. And it flags transactions that fall outside policy parameters in real time, so I can stop things before the money goes out."
— Lisa Norris, Director of Compliance & Privacy Officer
Compliance becomes a strategic advantage
The partnership between ABB Optical and Ramp delivered measurable impact across every dimension of the compliance workflow:
→ Faster Audits
What used to take two months now takes one to two days. Lisa reviews thousands of transactions monthly—typically finishing in 3 hours—because Ramp consolidates everything into a single screen. Under the old system, quarterly audits consumed 2-3 months each and still left blind spots.
→ Error rates dropped 85-90%
Real-time mobile capture, intuitive UX, and AI-powered guardrails mean transactions are cleaner from submission. As field reps adopted mobile workflows and the system learned patterns, error rates collapsed.
→ Strategic capacity unlocked
The efficiency gains freed Lisa to take on high-impact initiatives and provide broader compliance oversight. The platform creates leverage for regulated companies operating at scale.
→ Accountability across all levels
Lisa presents monthly reports to management and quarterly reports to the risk management committee, flagging transactions that are held up because they are awaiting reviewer approval, have missing information or receipts, require repayment, or are prohibited in accordance with company policy, so that everyone is accountable.
"Ramp gives us oversight across the entire organization. It's not just lower-level staff or field teams—executive leadership is held accountable too. From a compliance perspective, Ramp is the missing puzzle piece that finally gives us the full picture of our company expenses."
— Lisa Norris, Director of Compliance & Privacy Officer
A new standard for regulated industries
For Lisa, the contrast with legacy systems is stark: "Concur is archaic compared to Ramp's platform and ease of use. Ramp provides oversight beyond just financials—transparency into organizational spending, employee behavior, and real-time compliance across complex operations. Don't hesitate to make the transition. The benefits far outweigh the learning curve."
ABB Optical’s partnership with Ramp and MedPro demonstrates what’s possible when modern financial platforms are built with compliance leaders—not retrofitted for them. Compliance doesn't have to slow you down—when it's built into workflows instead of bolted on afterward, it becomes an enabler. And enterprise-grade doesn't require enterprise bloat: Ramp scales with sophisticated, regulated operations without 12-month implementations or rip-and-replace mandates.
Lisa's advice for compliance leaders
- Embed compliance into existing workflows. Look for platforms that integrate with the mission-critical systems you already use like MedPro Systems instead of forcing you to rebuild your entire compliance stack.
- Make compliance visible at every level of the organization. When executives, managers, and field teams all know their transactions are tracked and reported to leadership, compliance stops being something you enforce and starts being how the business operates. Transparency doesn't just catch problems—it prevents them.
- Design for adoption, not just compliance. The most robust compliance framework in the world is worthless if your field team won't use it. If people need a 20-page manual or extensive training to submit expenses correctly, you've already lost. At ABB Optical, 90% of our team submits via mobile without formal training—because the system works the way they work. When compliance is frictionless, adoption becomes automatic.
For life sciences organizations ready to modernize Sunshine Act compliance, ABB Optical's partnership with Ramp proves it's possible to move faster because compliance is built in, not bolted on.
