Monitoring more than 40,000 budgetary booking codes for traveler reimbursements became an enormous challenge for Viacom Inc.'s procurement team. Using those codes to obtain pre-trip approvals for every trip was no easier for the travelers themselves. The media and entertainment company turned to its IT department to build a better system that would allow for a more efficient pre-trip approval process.
"Every episode of SpongeBob SquarePants has a budget code," said David Mitchell, vice president of application development for Viacom's MTV Networks USA, speaking in December at a Business Travel Media Group forum. "Who's paying for this? I don't know. You have a full-time job to try and determine what happened. The whole principle of this is to eliminate that type of back-end search for the guilty, to know that pre-trip approval."
While the procurement and finance departments reconciled traveler errors in Viacom's back office, trips that were out of policy or coded incorrectly often were approved, said Viacom vice president of travel management Angela Mikellides.
"We had to do something to simplify the process," she said. "The goal was to be able to have a technical functionality to allow the end user to successfully make travel arrangements and manage them while providing us a checks-and-balances system that would validate the ancillary budget codes and authorize approvers. MTV, for example, has budget codes that can change daily depending on the purpose of travel and whether it relates to productions, sales, marketing or other business travel."
[PULL_1]The Viacom tool "reads itinerary details and costs, as well as reason codes," said Mikellides. "If approved, Viacom sends an approval message via Sabre Qik to CWT. CWT robotics reads the message and auto-tickets. The entire process, if approved immediately and all information is accurate, takes less than five minutes. If not approved, a CWT agent then contacts the travel arranger for further instructions."
The tool also indicates to the budget owner in "big red letters" if a booking is not in compliance with policy, and then provides the budget manager with the cost difference between the noncompliant booking and Viacom's preferred rates for air, car, rail and hotel.
... And Out With Antiquated Methods
Prior to the tool's implementation, the process "involved emails generated by an agent to the travel arranger, who then sent it to a supervisor or 'someone' to approve, who then sent it back to the agent, who placed it on a queue for ticketing," said Mikellides. "A formal list of approvers did not exist, as there were hundreds of people who could authorize a trip. Just as every episode can have a different budget code, so too is the case of who can approve a trip. This posed a great risk for the company as virtually anyone could approve a trip via email."
Furthermore, many of Viacom's travelers are freelancers or non-staff employees. "Some have fiscal responsibility, such as an executive producer or a line producer, whereas others do not, and that can vary from project to project," she added. "In addition, there was not an effective way of validating 40,000-plus budget codes or cost centers that are constantly changing; this created an accounting reconciliation challenge for us, as well."
Viacom's implementation of the tool was mainly "to drive compliance up," according to Mikellides. "With the support of my senior management and the company's restructuring of business processes, we created a system whereby the actual budget owner would have more ownership for the actions and responsibilities of booking travel," she said.
[PULL_2]"What you want to do is weed out what's not a valid exception--and we do get exception reporting, which is why we have seen a huge difference and all of a sudden people are going to think twice" before violating policy, she said. "In the beginning, when we had [a booking on] an out-of-policy carrier, sometimes [the traveler would] get away with it. We have seen the exceptions that are coming through are less and less."
Mitchell estimated the tool saved Viacom 15 percent to 20 percent overall, and money "spent to develop the system paid for itself since day one."
Mikellides added that key savings metrics include business efficiencies and improved traveler compliance. "You are increasing compliance because people become more aware of this process. When you increase compliance you are automatically gaining a savings."
Viacom now is developing mobile functionality. for the approvals tool "One of the drawbacks to this is that you cannot approve on a BlackBerry," Mikellides said, noting that those who approve trips also travel quite a bit. "We are taking it to the next level."