BTN Names Deutsche Bank's Debbie Dayton 2009's Top International Travel Manager
Business Travel News this week 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 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 its suppliers to deliver solutions," said BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer. "For leading the way in developing and deploying strategic multinational travel and meetings tools designed to achieve consistency in processes and data, create reporting that measures the return on investment, and enable 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 a large, global program with country participation worldwide it is critical to find the right balance between service delivery and cost," Dayton said. "To maintain support, you need flexibility to pull back from a supplier who has consistently underperformed in a particular country or market. This makes a one-agency supplier model very difficult to manage, as it can require a country to support the global program often at a detriment to services in their country, which can erode program compliance. My vision is to expand our global technology and push the market to design technology to work across multiple GDSs and mid-office tools to become the backbone of the program, allowing us more control by giving us the ability to bring on suppliers or remove as required."