Buyer Uses E-Mail Pre-Trip OK
<B> Buyer Uses E-Mail Pre-Trip OK</B>
By Sarah Welt
<I>Inglewood, Calif.</I> - Looking for a way to streamline its travel reservation process and get a handle on spending, Avnet Inc. has wrapped up a three-month e-mail request mandate begun at one division in April that has trimmed $250,000 out of its $7 million air travel budget line.
The e-mail mandate began as a way to take travel authorization responsibility out of the travel department and turn it over to departmental managers. It is one of several initiatives travel manager Annette Nevin and her rent-a-plate operation undertook in the past year to better manage travel.
Under the new travel request process, travelers are required to get pre-trip authorization from their managers via e-mail.
"It's taken me out of the approval process and made it internal within the business unit. It is now not up to the travel department to approve travel," Nevin said.
The process also allowed people to look more closely at reasons for traveling and focused on travel avoidance. To that end, Avnet recently set up videoconferencing as an alternative for communicating with all employees. Nevin said managers encouraged their staff to avoid travel by using conference calls and videoconferencing, even for some sales meetings with customers. Building on that success, Avnet is setting up videoconferencing locations in Inglewood and Phoenix, its two largest locations.
"Videoconferencing is mainly a way to more frequently reach all employees, but it's also a way to save on travel, that is for sure," she said.
During the company's recent restructuring, she noted, three or four internal meetings were taking place a week, and air volume was running "almost $500,000 just for meetings."
Tracking travel patterns in the three-month time frame covered by the pre-trip authorization test, meanwhile, yielded savings of a quarter of a million dollars. And even with the formal test over, "I expect we still will see savings," Nevin said.
The travel group's other initiatives have included selecting its first corporate card and automated expense reporting system, which will be rolled out simultaneously.
A committee headed by Nevin now is sending out requests for proposals to five or six potential automated expense reporting system vendors, with the hope of beginning beta testing before the end of the year. The team includes representatives from information systems, finance and accounting, as well as travel. In the meantime, the corporate card selection process has narrowed to only two vendors, American Express and Diners Club.
The card and technology vendors will be introduced "as a package," Nevin said. "We want to select a T&E vendor so we have the ability to download card data to our expense report, and we want software to interface with our general ledger systems."
On the front end, Avnet recently completed a beta test of Sabre Business Travel Solutions' dial-up version, then began testing the Internet version in late July.
"The dial-up was not as good as we thought it was going to be," Nevin said. "We think the Internet version will be a lot more acceptable."
Nevin, a 26-year veteran of American Airlines, joined Avnet in 1995 for the specific purpose of turning the operation into a rent-a-plate and hasn't looked back. "I like the travel management side better," she said.