Amex To Debut @ Work Purchasing Portal

<B> Amex To Debut @ Work Purchasing Portal</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty


Borrowing a page from enterprise computing, American Express Corporate Services this week in Minneapolis will announce a new travel portal, called American Express @ Work, that corporations can deploy to manage all travel, entertainment and purchasing functions.

In the next month, the company plans to begin beta testing the first release of the new portal with three customers, including Scientific Atlanta. By year-end, the second version is expected to be available to all agency and card customers. In coming months, the company also expects to announce a variety of partners it will be using to actually host everything and provide a default purchasing software and catalog for those customers who do not have their own.

The site will offer everything a company needs to manage its travel and purchasing online--from booking and expense reporting applications for travelers to management reporting and benchmarks--with American Express handling all application hosting externally. A company would simply have to have an intranet or Internet access in place with the latest browsers.

"The Internet is changing dramatically the way business-to-business e-commerce occurs. It's far bigger than business-to-consumer," said Ed Gilligan, president of American Express Corporate Services. "We thought the way American Express can add value to its customers is by bringing the best Internet products to market. Customers will only have to implement this one, by bringing travel and expense reporting, purchasing and corporate card servicing all together, we can offer a desktop portal to all our clients."

From this travel portal, travelers, program administrators and managers will use security logins to gain access to relevant areas from seven different business centers: client services center to manage employee profiles and hierarchies; consulting services center with diagnostic tools, access to surveys, benchmarks and savings calculators; T&E center offering the online booking tools, travel information, online card billing statements, expense reporting tool and program management tools; purchasing center with either a client's sourcing and ordering applications or a third-party provider that Amex has yet to choose, supplier directories and purchasing reconciliation tools; card administrative options to add and cancel cards, and change spending limits online; an information center for program managers offering access to standard and custom management information system reports; a community center for various user groups, such as travelers within a company, or travel or card administrators, essentially giving them chat rooms; an employee center or area that would serve as a travel home page with policy, preferred vendors or other notices.

"One of the beauties of this, is it will be truly personalized," said Pam Codispoti, vice president of marketing. "We'll be able to identify specific messages to meet a corporation's or individual's needs."

While American Express has been testing its online corporate and purchasing card management and MIS reporting, this would be the first widespread launch of these applications. Some consulting reports and benchmarks have been available online, but a more extensive library--as well as the ability to perform savings calculations or on-the-fly comparisons with others--will be offered for the first time.

Gilligan emphasized that Amex is building @ Work "in an open way. We'll be offering Concur and Microsoft AXI, but if they want to choose other applications and plug them into the business centers, they can."

The other big change in this offering, Gilligan said, is that it's a service bureau. "It's all hosted outside of a client's browser. Pay as you go, not massive upfront license fees."

Pricing therefore will depend on how many pieces of the portal a client wants, obviously with volume discounts. "Our goal is to tie everything we're doing into services for the client, to save the clients money," Gilligan emphasized.

Today, companies that are licensing applications are "spending millions of dollars up-front--and it could take them a year to get usage. Here, they'll only pay based on what they use. I think it's a far cheaper model compared to what they have today," Gilligan said.

Amex expects to gain a much better understanding of the pricing during the three beta tests with clients, added spokesperson Chris Levite. "When we launch, we want to have a much better idea of this. People understand the general benefits of business-to-business e-commerce. It won't be difficult to communicate the need to their senior management."

Norm Rose of TravelTech Consulting in Belmont, Calif., said portals have been a trend in enterprise computing for about a year. "It's so logical and overdue in travel."

Of course, Rose did have some concerns about the execution and questioned whether the new portal will allow customers to truly drill down into data and see one view of global card and agency spend.

Rose also questioned how American Express will help corporations integrate the data into their existing financial or enterprise resource planning systems to help managers answer bigger questions--such as "How much did this customer really cost me?"--factoring in all travel and other expenses.