ITW's Cathy Sharpe Chases Freedom Within a Framework

Cathy Sharpe signed on as ITW's director of global travel and expense in 2006 with the goal of consolidating the organization's unwieldy travel program. ITW had roughly 700 unique businesses making up about 100 divisions "running their own shows," Sharpe said, but joined under a loosely structured conglomerate. At the time, the company held service contracts with 33 agencies, multiple card vendors and vanishingly little expense automation. Most challenging of all, she said: "We had very little usable data."

Knowing that she needed data in order to drive the rest of the program, Sharpe started end-to-end implementation with the most complete source: expense. She plugged 350 back-office systems into Concur, which was no mean feat. "We had to go to each business to implement the Concur platform but also policy," she said. "It had to be a simple platform that each company could administer [because] each business manages to its own profit-and-loss sheet."

Even so, Sharpe knew that consolidating volume and working toward global contracts with suppliers would offer ITW's individual businesses compelling pricing and service benefits they didn't have with a fragmented approach. "Savings was paramount to them," Sharpe said. "They were all stretching budgets."

Early Successes

Sharpe counts 30 years in the travel space: on the agency side, on the supply side but mostly as a buyer. "I'm a believer in managed travel," she said. "I believe in the agency model." And she executed on that model for ITW. In 2015, she was ready to declare success at ITW. She had consolidated to a single agency with American Express Global Business Travel, along with the American Express corporate card. The globalized Concur system was delivering data, and agency and card data were kicking in, as well. Sharpe had brokered two alliance contracts with airlines, plus global hotel agreements. ITW divested and acquired new companies in a constant stream, but onboarding and offboarding business to and from the travel program was a fairly turn-key process.

In February 2015, Sharpe said, "We can see now: Are they actually booking travel through American Express and if they're not, why aren't they? We're measuring that and reporting back on all levels of the organization." Sharpe had driven adoption largely to preferred channels and suppliers and seemed to be delivering the right value to her stakeholders. Even more, she was "putting the information in leadership's hands so they can manage the business."

But she knew early on that emerging forces were working against her gated system—in the seams of ITW's loosely stitched structure and as corporate travelers sought consumer experiences. "Back in the day, travel managers were the subject matter experts," said Sharpe. "Those days are long gone. Everyone is an investigator, and instead of me buying a commodity, now I have 20,000 individual buyers under a commodity that I'm selling to them." Plus, she said, the power of the consumer shopping experience, along with special rates and services driven by loyalty status, was only getting stronger.

Sharpe soon found that fewer of her customers were buying what she was selling, particularly in terms of hotels. By early 2016, her 67 percent channel compliance for hotel bookings—those going through the agency or online tool—had cratered to 40 percent. "My customers needed something that I wasn't supplying," she said. "And I had to figure out how to supply it."

Bridging the Gap

"She saw diverging trends in managed travel before most other corporations saw it," said Anthony Toth, Western division managing director at United Airlines. "She recognized a shift in workforce dynamics at her company, and she saw the larger shift driven by digital natives who wanted to utilize new technologies that have not been available to managed travelers in terms of the booking experience and apps and loyalty. She wants to bring those elements of consumer travel into the managed program."

At the same time, added Concur senior vice president of supplier services Charlie Sultan, "she was driven by the decentralized nature of her organization to figure out a way to capture all of this activity within the systems she'd put in place but still allow [ITW businesses] to operate with individual budgetary responsibility and freedoms."

The tension between these two concerns—data support for the organization alongside program flexibility and a better experience for savvy travelers—drove Sharpe to investigate using TripLink, Concur's email parsing and direct-connect tool that has promised to deliver supplier.com booking data back to the corporation.

Controversial when introduced about four years ago, TripLink remains a niche product for Concur as well as a work in progress. Its direct-connect supplier base has grown more slowly than anticipated and is concentrated in the hotel and car rental space. Airlines were conspicuously absent until United Airlines launched its beta program this summer. Concur has forged agreements with American Airlines, Air Canada, Etihad, Iberia and Lufthansa, but timelines for launch have been unclear.

Concur executive vice president of supplier and TMC services Mike Koetting told BTN in March that TripLink clients had swelled to 6,000, largely using only the email parsing functionality. A number of those clients have commented publically on the difficulty in motivating travelers to forward emails and also about the flaws in TripLink reporting.

That said, Sharpe's results have been stunning.

The ITW Pilot Program

With hotel compliance rates plummeting, Sharpe identified a large group of frequent ITW business travelers who might benefit from the TripLink solution. Like the majority of TripLink clients, she has primarily used the email parsing version for now, and while other early adopters have struggled to forward emails consistently and on a large scale, Sharpe has been able to drive that behavior and get the data to analyze results.

In April, she told BTN her program saved an average of $2 per day compared to her negotiated rates for bookings made outside the managed channel. By September, it was $6 per day.

There were other important points in the data beyond the savings. Namely, most of the off-channel spend was with preferred suppliers. "Our employees are doing the right things, but they are looking for more value. They might be getting more personal loyalty benefits [by going direct], but they are also getting better rates and better information for decision-making," she said. "The travel management industry has been saying, 'No, no, no,' but the data says they are [finding savings]. Things change. And we have to be able to accept that and be part of that disruption."

The TripLink pilot program has contributed to ITW's $15 million in travel savings for 2016.

It's not just ITW that benefits from Sharpe's success. She has Concur's ear, and they are taking action.

"Cathy has a breadth of knowledge about how all the different pieces work. It gives her a unique ability to challenge Concur and challenge the industry to make things better," said Sultan. Along with the challenge, he said, comes Sharpe's willingness to co-create solutions. She also weighs in on reporting. "It's not 100 percent yet, but she's made recommendations and enhancements to what we should be showing."

Doubling Down

Sharpe is looking to double down on the TripLink opportunity, both for herself and for the industry, by participating in United Airlines' beta launch. "She was the only travel manager outside the West Coast technology community who wanted to be a part of this program," United's Toth told BTN. That was a windfall for United.

Instead of showing up to the beta with techie travelers headquartered in major city pairs, Sharpe brought a significant amount of complexity to the table. She describes ITW as sitting "in every cornfield of every country." That has been a great opportunity for United to test, for example, how TripLink works when an atypical United.com customer comes on in the United Kingdom or Germany or Asia.

"Are we handling the ticketing country correctly? How does the data come in and flow to Prism? Can we get the duty of care to her company? She gave us every condition, which is why we love having ITW in the beta," Toth said.

For her own purposes, Sharpe has keyed into unused tickets. "Imagine all the exchanges that go to waste," she said during a BTN roundtable in September. "Maybe [the booking] was done on the website because it was an emergency and the traveler had to book it on the fly. When I think of all the unused tickets, they are significant. They are not owned by the traveler; they are owned by the company, and we want to get that information back."

Toth said Sharpe's influence on this issue is shaping United's TripLink development. For now, if a passenger cancels a reservation, the dollar amount associated with that passenger name record is held aside for one year in a services fund that a corporation with a contract can use to manage day-to-day exchange expenses and ticketing. Sharpe has pushed for better automation for this process so those funds are not forgotten and then lost.

"Her input has spurred more attention in this area, and it's now one of the most important factors of the direct connect that we need to solve," said Toth. He added that her experience working with duty-of-care providers and understanding their data needs has made United's beta launch more comprehensive. "We're doing that everyday now as part of the TripLink bundle."

Driving the Future

Both Sultan and Toth commented on Sharpe's clarity of purpose, her willingness to accept changing industry dynamics and her ability to push hard toward next-generation travel management.

"She's been able to shape the direct channel because she knows how to engage and motivate her travelers. She's taken the time to understand the tools, communicated a clear message to her travelers, given them the choices, shown them what it looks like and explained the value proposition," said Toth. "That has helped United because we need to see critical mass with the data. We have to survey the users of the system so when we role this out we've tested every aspect. We have been able to do that with Cathy because of how well she's driven adoption. That's hard to find."

While Sharpe underscores that her program is just a pilot, the influence of that pilot has been far reaching and is likely to extend farther as Sharpe continues to focus her vision. Ultimately, she says, despite the fact that she's working with off-channel tools, it all comes back to the TMC, which she believes is at the heart of managed travel.

"The TMCs need the data, and they need to be able to service the bookings," she said. "While I haven't seen as much concern on the hotel side, on the air side, things get tricky. You need to be able to provide some service elements if someone needs it. It's simple to say that anything can be done online, but we know the reality: People need service," said Sharpe.

"I believe in the TMC and I want them to remain relevant and stretch and find new opportunities—not commoditized, not transaction. What else are you bringing to collaborate with me? Better data, better services? That's where we ultimately have to end up."