Instead of talking about how to gain senior management attention to travel expense, Capital One Financial's travel team built an executive dashboard that offers "more in-depth transparency of the travel and expense spend," according to Tamara Jones, senior manager of travel, expense management and accounts payable in Capital One Services' office of financial management.
Capital One's travel team on a quarterly basis compiles the Executive Committee Travel and Expense Dashboard, which details companywide and divisional performance in relation to such travel management goals as advance bookings, online booking adoption and use of lowest fares.
"The key is keeping it as elementary as possible so we don't need to educate them on travel lingo," Jones said. The dashboard is compiled in a "more organized, high-level fashion and a little more prescriptive" than what managers receive on their teams' T&E monthly report. It's also another layer to regular traveler and manager communications.
Mirroring the look of other Capital One reports, the travel dashboard relies on a red-yellow-green approach to detail each "division's spend and travel" versus other business units and corporate goals. The report becomes "prescriptive in that more can see exactly where they are" as compared to other divisions. "Our number one focus was on reducing travel and expense costs," Jones said.
[PULL_1]While some elements of the quarterly dashboard remain constant, other elements vary based on the story that needs to be communicated to senior management and trickled down to travelers. After reviewing data each quarter, Jones said, "We ask, 'What's the most powerful information? What behavior needs to change this quarter?' " While the top three dashboard elements are advance booking, online booking and using the lowest fares, "We also give visibility to travel and non-travel categories that fall elsewhere in the expense management sides," such as spend by suppliers or associate recognition, she explained. "This dashboard is bigger than just travel-related. We had to get our arms around a lot of information, figure out what would be the powerful thing to get their attention and to understand that this was a priority," Jones said.
Savings Goals Achieved
"What we finally did was take a pretty big leap and give specific information about each division, by leader, that gave them visibility to different types of spend, the categories, where it was happening, what went well, what didn't go well and even visibility to top travelers," Jones said. "We definitely changed behavior. We met our goals as a company to lower T&E last year. Since then, times have changed. However, we as a company have very good travel practices. Compliance to travel policy and preferred vendors has improved, even as economic conditions improved.
"I believe it's because of the visibility we created," she added. As the economy and company profits improved, "we did not stop" distribution of the dashboard.
Visibility At The Top
At every industry conference, Jones said, "there is always talk about how do you create more visibility and communicate with your CEO. I don't know that anyone has gotten it right, and I'm not saying that this is the master plan. But it's always easier when there's an appetite."
In addition to management visibility to T&E, the dashboard and resulting reduction in travel expenditures garnered the Capital One travel team internal recognition as well as the first Association of Corporate Travel Executives/MasterCard Excellence Award for Management of Corporate Travel Spend, presented last fall at the ACTE conconference in Berlin.
An award selection committee reviewed several nominations and selected the Capital One team as the one that "demonstrated creativity and innovation in their approach to delivering solutions and programs that benefit their travelers and their company," said MasterCard Worldwide multinational corporate program vice president Leigh Bochicchio.
The award "created even more visibility that we were doing the right thing," Jones said.
The dashboard and more organized data also helped with recent supplier negotiations, she added
"When negotiating with airlines, agencies and hotels, the more data you have, and more compliance you have, the more you have to work with in negotiations to get better deals," Jones said. "In our industry, we're able to stay away, for the most part, from guarantees, but we can make some grounded assessments of where we’ll be because we have such good compliance. We can anticipate what our travelers will do."
Suppliers "know we're serious about managing to compliance. They know what a huge effort this was for us and how much we're pushing it," Jones said.
"I don't know that this is rocket science," she continued. "Many people have this vision. But what made us different is finally pulling the trigger and sending something out. Many people talk about wanting to, but we actually did it."