Profiles In Travel Management - 2006-08-14

Rapid Booking Tool Rollou

Company: Avaya Inc.
Headquarters: Basking Ridge, N.J.
2005 U.S. Booked Air: $25 million
2006 U.S. Booked Air: $19 million year to date, annual estimated to be $40 million

Achieving a 90 percent adoption rate for an online booking tool might be easier when you have such tech-savvy employees as the ones at telecommunications company Avaya Inc., but it also helps to be able to construct a travel program from scratch and then have it mandated by senior management.

"We're a very self-service company," said Adrienne Fox, former professional services buyer at Avaya's worldwide indirect sourcing department, who recently transitioned to meetings procurement and card services within the same department at the company. "We already had a 64 percent adoption rate with GetThere. When we incorporated American Express' TravelBahn online portal for profiles, we went from 64 percent to 72 to 78 to 82 to 90 percent. We've been steady at 90 percent for so long now." Fox noted that these figures do not include executive-level travel, which Avaya's travel department does not handle.

Two years after spinning off from technology provider Lucent Technologies, Avaya—which initially fully outsourced travel—created an in-house travel department to manage spend, with some outsourcing. After a six-month request-for-proposals process that included traditional and Internet-based travel management companies, Fox selected American Express to help manage Avaya's travel, as well as the company's corporate card program.

"American Express is a very strategic supplier for us and a truly global solution," she said. "We had been using them in several countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia/Pacific, but not in the U.S. It's a simplification in management: Card and travel just go together. Because we have the card and had American Express successfully implemented in other countries, it seemed like a win-win."

Before rolling out American Express, Fox started a communications campaign to reiterate the company's travel policy, holding seminars, distributing information via e-mail and revamping Avaya's intranet travel page to help guide employees to make the right decisions. This philosophy of education through communication eventually evolved as the backbone of Fox's travel program and her primary method of increasing adoption and compliance rates.

"When you have a spinoff from a large company, a lot gets lost. One of the things our global leadership was really keen on at the time was communication and education, and that's my background," said Fox, who also has worked as a paralegal and in compliance operations. "The thinking was, 'If we let everybody know all the information, it will enable them and help them make the right decision.' I based the program on the three prongs of communication, education and going online with American Express' online portal."

As Avaya transitioned away from outsourcing, Fox started implementing American Express while simultaneously adding a global travel manager, a travel specialist and ad-hoc sourcing support. Fox said the transition from full-fledged outsourcing to an in-house travel department was a smooth one, due in part to American Express' corporate travel platform. "It's a profile management tool and purely an online process, although I do attribute a lot of that success to the fact that our employees are pretty technology-oriented, because we are a technology company," said Fox, who counts somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 travelers in the travel program, including arrangers.

In fact, Fox is certain that much of the success of the travel program is self-driven by employees. "It's always been a mandate to use the agency," she said, adding that pushing through a mandate for the online booking tool wasn't that difficult, as self-service is a strong component of Avaya's corporate culture. "What hadn't been promoted as much was the online tool. Some of our travelers are very savvy and prefer to take booking into their own hands. Plus, one of the benefits of using the travel program is that you can use our discount for personal use on car and hotel. It's almost like the more you know about traveling for business, the more you know the benefits on the personal side."

In her new position in Avaya's procurement department, Fox is helping Janine Battaglia, who has taken on Fox's travel responsibilities at the company, transition to her duties in leading the department. Like many buyers, Fox in her new role is focused on creating a corporate meetings program.

"On the travel and card program side, we're using some corporate purchasing cards for our catalogue purchases and that's my new goal: I'm trying to expand the use of our corporate card purchasing program to gain better visibility and management over our card program," she said. "We also have meeting cards and are in the process of looking at a meetings procurement program. If it goes through the way I hope it does, it would be done by October. The policies will be rewritten. Though the content was good, we're just reworking the language to be a bit of an easier read. The meetings program will take some time," she continued, adding that Avaya is working on contractual addendum language, a mandated registration process for meetings that include 10 or more hotel rooms and technology to support sourcing and savings tracking.

Her number-one goal for 2006 also centers on meetings. "What we'd like—and we'd love to have American Express help us—is to have a truly global air platform," Fox said. "We have some extremely large meetings and one thing that's been apparent is that we need some way to really and truly globally coordinate group air events. It's not very easy today."