Dayton Top Int'l Travel Mgr.

Business Travel News last month named Deutsche Bank global head of travel-related services Debbie Dayton as the 2009 International Travel Manager of the Year during the Association of Corporate Travel Executives' Global Education Conference in Prague.

"This year's winner pushed the envelope for what is possible when it comes to capturing strategic global travel and meetings management data through automation and process improvements and drove suppliers to deliver solutions," said BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer, who presented the award to Dayton "for leading the way in developing and deploying strategic multinational travel and meetings tools designed to achieve consistency in processes and data, creating reporting that measures the return on investment, and enabling the company and colleagues to leverage that data for all it is worth."

Dayton and the bank's travel and events teams in the past two years led immense global changes by bringing worldwide consistency in automation and processes and arming the company for negotiations with hundreds of data elements.

Perhaps the 32-country travel program's loftiest accomplishment came as part of its two-year strategic meetings management reengineering process. Deutsche Bank worked with meetings technology provider StarCite to develop new electronic meetings processes, including budgeting, requests for proposals, reporting, reconciliation and data modules, that have become part of StarCite's meetings management platform. The enhancements now are in use not only by 45 Deutsche Bank meeting planners and administrative assistants worldwide, but also in hundreds of other major corporations.

The Frankfurt-based financial services company, which had a $495 million global travel program in 2008 that served more than 78,000 employees, also undertook a global transient data consolidation project that enables the company to leverage its full travel and meetings buying power around the world.

Dayton in the past year also added travel components to the bank's carbon reduction initiatives, evaluated a global chauffeured transportation technology platform and implemented new travel communications portals using Web 2.0 technology.

In 2007, under a procurement-led initiative, the bank began compiling its fragmented meeting planning and procurement operations in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Within one year, Deutsche Bank was operating its new meetings program in those three countries, which comprise the vast majority of its meetings spending. Following those quick but large wins in March, the company made its first strategic meetings management inroads in Asia/Pacific by deploying the technology in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.

The bank now is rolling out some components in India, often a difficult market to establish meetings management processes, and is integrating some reservations processes in South America into the meetings technology.

The measured approach to deploying the technology comes from the complexities of managing a global program, said Dayton.

"Everywhere we go with anything we do in any country, we have to cover all data privacy, all legal, look at disaster recovery and make sure we have redundant systems," she said. "There is a whole protocol internally that we have to follow with everything we do."

The travel and meetings team, including vice president and project lead for the meetings program Shawn Radek, in 2007 began the process of replacing its spreadsheet-based meetings management toolbox. The bank, a member of StarCite's development advisory group, worked with StarCite to revamp the technology company's sparsely used budget analyzer tool.

The enhanced tool now provides the projected total cost of an event, including transportation spending, before the meeting approval process. Deutsche Bank pre-loads the tool biannually with average negotiated hotel rates, airfares and other metrics, including average food and beverage costs. Meeting planners populate the guest fields and other parameters and can compare costs across cities. For cities where the bank does little or no business, StarCite populates fields with average costs from its database.

In total, Deutsche Bank contributed about 40 features to StarCite's standard platform, primarily around the expansion of the budgeting and reconciliation processes. Melding transportation costs into the equation provided a new level of budget evaluation.

The expanded system now has more than 200 line items, which deliver pre- and post-event reporting from multiple views and can be broken down to a cost-per-attendee basis. The technology offers Deutsche Bank instant reporting across business lines, corporate hierarchical levels and regions.

As more comparative data becomes available, the new level of reporting will enable Deutsche Bank to measure the return on its meetings investment. That investment stood at $132 million in 2009, which, with the bank's $368 million in global transient travel spending, offers strong negotiating leverage.

While getting the meetings program under control was a massive task, another was consolidating transient travel data from Deutsche Bank's travel management companies. Doing so was "one of the biggest contributions to reducing costs," Dayton said.

To do that, the bank's three agencies—HRG in North America, BCD Travel in Europe and American Express Business Travel in Asia/Pacific—standardized the point-of-sale process across the entire program. As with its meetings data, senior management now receives new reporting elements. The bank generates more than 700 reports monthly about the travel of its worldwide employee base.

"It gives somebody with responsibility for the cost within their business line a snapshot of what's happening," Dayton said. "This was driven by my team to support the stakeholders. It was designed for them to say they don't need to know all of this other stuff. We need to know it to manage your business for you, but what you need to know are these key bits of information in order to understand your spend."

Data-capturing efforts also have been key in Deutsche Bank's efforts to become carbon neutral. The travel team currently is recording the carbon footprints of its top travelers in each country "to try and raise awareness on the impact we are having on our environment as we travel," Dayton said.

As in the United States, the company is deploying in the United Kingdom a pre-trip approval system that integrates cost and carbon emissions data for managers to consider before signing off on a trip.

In the bank's preferred booking channels, green suppliers are highlighted to direct business their way, Dayton said.

The meetings team is working with the company's corporate social responsibility team to identify the 10 most critical green criteria to evaluate in the RFP process.

Dayton and her team of 12 also have pursued chauffeured transportation, an annual expenditure of tens of millions of dollars for hundreds of thousands of rides in New York and London alone.

In 2010, Dayton said she plans to begin rolling out a single automated chauffeured transportation platform in the United Kingdom and the United States.

"Today we have different systems in the United Kingdom and the United States, and neither of those are expandable," she said. "Our goal is to get both countries on one platform for black car services and have it more easily deployable among the other countries so that we can tap in and make it a global platform. If I'm going into China, it would automatically know who our ground transportation provider is there and how I can book that and get the same rates we would locally, instead of someone calling a secretary in China to book a car."

Meanwhile, the travel team has been the first organization within the bank to deploy the Joomla content management system as its communications portal. The portal is configured into global, regional and country-specific sites that have access to all of the program's policies and tools.

Dayton also contributes video postings with messages about the program and hosts discussion boards and a blog on the portal.

With balancing cost and service becoming increasingly complex in a globally expanding travel program like Deutsche Bank's, technology becomes the anchor on which to pin long-term success, Dayton said.

"It's less of a focus to drive to one agency and more of a focus on trying to find technology that can optimize the program and drive cost reductions across the board," Dayton said. "One of the challenges that I face and other travel managers face all the time is that if service starts to drop in one country that country wants to pull out of the program. I can't force a country to take inferior service because it's better for the region or better for the program globally. I'm looking for technology solutions that can cut across multiple partners and become my core technology for the program."