Joe Monaghan
Tri-Pen TravelMaster Technologies and parent Tri-Pen Management last month appointed 23-year travel industry veteran Joe Monaghan as chief operating officer. Monaghan retained his role as head of global business development for both entities. The business process outsourcing and technology firms--whose technology platform is designed to merge booked, corporate card, expense report and other data to provide corporations with the most current view of travel activity and spending--this week also announced the promotion of Thomas Sheehan to chief information officer. Monaghan, who joined Tri-Pen in December 2005 after holding executive sales support and technology positions with both WorldTravel BTI (now BCD Travel) and American Express Corporate Services, began is career in travel management more than 20 years ago as travel manager for Dr. Pepper. He spoke with Management.travelabout his new role, Tri-Pen's focus and industry data consolidation trends. An excerpt follows.
Are you on the technology side, consulting side or both?
Tri-Pen Management is very much a business process outsourcer--a consultant to the industry. We have 18 clients and about three-quarters of a billion dollars (of corporate travel under management) in our organization. As far as I know, we are the largest group out there managing business travel. Tri-Pen Technology is the technology branch that gives access to folks in Tri-Pen and Tri-Pen Direct (a Web services environment) to look across a broad variety of data. What our clients tell us they like is our consulting that shows them how to run the technology after the fact. Even though we've got this large database with dynamic dashboards, clients still have to get used to a new way to manage and look at the data. The consulting group has been using this product for years; that is their role to make sure a client gets, and is very successful using, the technology as opposed to "We're going to implement it, have a good day."
How are you distributing the technology?
A few years back, we thought that some of the large agencies would want to leverage the technology because it was really cutting edge. What we found was that the investment those companies would have to make in just the hardware alone made them really step back. We got such a huge calling from corporations specifically, but when we started to talk to corporations about that same investment in hardware, it was very clear that frankly they didn't have an appetite for that kind of investment in infrastructure and hardware. So, we made a change in course, which is one of the great things a small company can do. We'll build out the infrastructure, we'll host it--we're offering Tri-Pen Direct so corporations can access the technology without the significant investment in hardware and infrastructure. We did change our plans a bit. The core technology is still available for large companies if they want to make that kind of investment in infrastructure. But by far our greatest path right now is those companies that say, "We love the fact that you're agnostic and we can pull in data from virtually any data feeds."
Is Tri-Pen Direct in use today?
Right now, we have three clients in pilot, Tri-Pen Management, ON Semiconductor and W.R. Grace. We have a fairly long list of clients that we'll be on boarding into Tri-Pen Direct over the next six months. What we're trying to accomplish in 2008 is to really solidify the infrastructure, make sure we build out the product right and have the right kind of account management group in place to help our clients take the technology and really leverage it in their own environment. We're in no rush to build out a sales team that will grab 50 to 60 clients--that's not our goal for 2008 at all. Our goal is to make sure that every one of our pilot clients has a great experience, that they see the value and become a reference for us. Then in 2009, or late this year perhaps, we'll get more into a true business development effort and acquire some top-notch sales folks to build more of a pipeline.
Has this taken longer than anticipated?
I wish I could tell you it hadn't, but yeah, it's taken longer than anticipated. Just like every other technology company, we thought we had it nailed down pretty tight. As it turned out, we needed to make some adjustments, both in the core technology and the way we went to market. We've done that.
Card vendors have been promising streamlined, or even one, global data feed for years. Is pulling in all this data from disparate sources getting any easier, or is it still a challenge?
It's still a whopper big challenge. We make no bones about it: This is really hard stuff. Even within brands--within the Amex brand, Visa or MasterCard--the difference between data in different parts of the world is just incredible. Right now we have four primary sources of data feeds--card, agency, expense reporting and human resources. I would say the general ledger feeds from Amex are more standard, but they lack some of the fields that we used to get in the "KR" series of reports. I'm sure that's only because some fields are just not available regionally around the globe. But I'm not sure it's a step up--it's just a step in the path to standardize this data, and that is a huge task.