GE Capital Estimates Travel Management Savings

<B> GE Capital Estimates Travel Management Savings</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty

<I>Salt Lake City</I> - Incorporating best practices into a software program, GE Capital Corporate Expense Management Services has developed a "savings estimator" that can identify potential savings on each of 20 different travel management tactics.

Developed as a sales tool for the National Business Travel Association's annual convention, the estimator "stimulates a discussion and shows what the savings would be," if the corporation would adopt 20 different tools that GE recommends as best practices, said Mitch Gross, vice president of marketing for GE Capital.

To reveal the savings estimate, a corporate executive would first answer a series of questions about his or her travel program, including annual T&E spend, volume captured on current card, international spend, number of cards and trips and the estimated cost to process both an expense report and reservation.

Default values are included in the software for any unknown factors.

The software then calculates how much the company could save by adopting each of the 20 best practices that GE Capital has identified with existing customers, including enhanced policy compliance, deploying an automated expense reporting program, using a dining card program and better preferred vendor relationships. If a corporation also has one of the recommended programs, the savings potential for that area can be turned off.

In one demonstration, the savings estimator revealed savings of $1.25 million on an annual T&E spend of $5 million. The savings would come from better use of preferred vendors. In this example, the company reported only a 50 percent use of preferred hotels. Using the company's 16,000 trips a year, averaging three nights each, the software determined that the company was getting its preferred rate on only 24,000 of its 48,000 annual room nights. If the company was losing $5 per room night, that's a total of $120,000 a year.