MILLBRAE, Calif. -- Acquisition and use of travel data,
globilization of travel policy and gaining the endorsement of
senior management are the three key factors that help determine the
success of a corporate travel program, according to a top travel
consultant.
Brian Johnston, senior manager at the Deloitte & Touche
Consulting Group, cited a best-practices survey conducted by his
company of 25 corporations.
One finding was not a surprise, he said, and it showed that the
participants whose companies achieved the highest compliance with
corporate policy achieved the highest savings, and that those with
the highest level of senior management endorsement saved the most
on costs.
The findings also showed that expense reporting is central to
the travel and entertainment process, offering the greatest
potential for cost savings while increasing traveler
convenience.
Those corporations with the best practices spent an average of
$8.93 of employee time in the preparation, approval and auditing of
expense reports. Those that were not as efficient spent as much as
$29.41 on the process.
Minimizing the manual portions of report preparation is the key
to maximizing both cost efficiency and traveler convenience,
Johnston said.
On average, expense report preparation involves more than 30
minutes of direct time per expense report. Travelers in
best-practices companies spent 20 minutes per report.
Greg Hammermaster, director of corporate commercial card
products for San Francisco-based Visa USA, said automating the
expense reporting process, including the use of a corporate card as
the "primary enabler" for collection of information, is critical.
"You've got to get better information," he said.
He also emphasized the importance of senior executive
endorsement of automated expense reporting systems, saying "it's
the only best practice that transcends the company-culture
issue."
Julie Blickle, travel manager for Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
of Berkeley, Calif., outlined some of the issues she confronted in
her company's implementation of Extensity software. The lab also
earlier this year installed the Internet Travel Network's
self-booking product on the company's intranet.
She said the decision to purchase the automation was made to
ensure compliance with travel policy, to streamline the
reimbursement process and to collect data for contract negotiations
with vendors. "The biggest challenge was overcoming enforcement
issues," Blickle said.
"Folks were used to doing things their own way [but] this is an
investment in the future."
She said she didn't expect a quick adoption rate of the
self-booking and T&E expense reporting system, but she does
expect gradual adoption. She said self-booking eventually will
become the norm as employees become more comfortable with the
concept.
"We're looking at having our travelers do their own bookings and
eventually saying to our travel management company that we only
need them for complex international bookings," she said.
Even though only 2% of the bookings are made with Internet
Travel Network under the 3-month old product, "We still have cost
savings because people are shopping on line and saving time on the
phone" with travel agents.