Colleges Enroll Online Travel Systems

<B> Colleges Enroll Online Travel Systems</B>
<I>Implement Automated Expense Reporting And Booking Technology</I>

By Lynn Woods

Following in the footsteps of their corporate counterparts, travel managers at universities and colleges from Harvard to UCLA are beginning to implement automated booking and expense reporting systems.

At Harvard University, the travel office this month is launching a pilot of Xpense Management Solution, Concur Technologies' automated expense-reporting product. Frank Schnur, Harvard's director of travel, said the new system will finally enable the travel department to get a handle on the university's travel expenses.

"Because universities and colleges have never been able to mandate use of the travel agency or corporate card, we've never been able to have a good source of data," Schnur said. "I've been in a horrible negotiating position, but now for the first time we'll have a souce of data that's 100 percent complete. We'll be able to present more detailed information and know who's not using our preferred vendors."

Colorado State University also is automating its expense reporting system. It has purchased the 7.1 Windows version of Gelco's Travel Manager, which has been installed on CSU's dozen or so information systems computers. Over the coming months, Travel Manager will be rolled out on a department-by-department basis at the university's nine colleges and numerous off-campus cooperative extension offices.

"Paper documents are extremely expensive to produce, considering all the copies that have to be made," said CSU systems manager Kelly Overturf. "It's also labor intensive. This product will save us time and money."

The University of California at Los Angeles is taking a slightly different tack: the travel department has signed with Extensity, the Java Internet-based solution for expense reporting, which it will begin rolling out in February to the 100 faculty members in its graduate school. At UCLA, though, "data is not the driving force" of the rollout, since the university already gets data from its travel agency, said corporate travel programs director Rebecca Beatty. Rather, the motivation was to "streamline the expense-reporting process and provide much better service to our customers."

Two other University of California facilities, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also have contracted for Extensity Expense Reports.

While the impetus behind the evolution from paper to automation at large educational institutions essentially mirrors that at corporations--to consolidate and streamline the travel management process to capture data, speed up transactions, and save on documentation and labor expenses--the unique university culture has spawned a different set of challenges in implementing these systems.

"As suppliers in the travel industry get to know us, they find out we're a different animal," said Marguerite Fink, manager of travel services at Penn State. "We purchase huge dollar amounts of travel, but we're working in an environment of academic freedom. We must sell people on the concept, rather than tell them to use it. Highly educated people feel they can make their own decisions."

Because university faculty members often are paying for travel out of grant money, there's a greater cost-consciousness and sense of independence. On the plus side, this means university travelers are motivated to pay the lowest price for airfare, hotel rooms and rental cars, but it also can lead to problems in terms of compliance and tracking expenses.

University travelers are more sophisticated about technology and generally more computer literate than the average corporate employee, making them more open, perhaps, to using automated systems. Many college campuses have a smorgasbord of hardware and software systems. This multi-platform environment presents challenges to travel suppliers.

Finally, travel expenses at universities are commonly paid by a variety of funding sources. Pre-trip approvals are a key component of the travel booking process, and an institution may have thousands of accounting codes. Some universities also are subject to state reporting requirements. Their expense reporting needs in many ways are more similar to those of a government agency than a corporate entity.

CSU, for example, chose Gelco Travel Manager, a product used by 80 federal government agencies and departments, partly because of its ability to accommodate the university's 9,500 accounting codes, which other systems couldn't do, Overturf said. CSU is Gelco's first university client, but Travel Manager can provide the level of detail required in university expense reports, which are subject to state government specifications. When reporting mileage, for example, CSU must break down data both by state employee and non-state employee (some university staff are state employees, while others aren't) and by in-state and out-of-state miles, Overturf said.

Until now, CSU travelers have been submitting pre-trip approval and expense reports entirely on paper. The decision to move to an electronic process stemmed from a broader campus-wide automation initiative that includes purchasing as well as procurement, which was completely automated last summer. With about 8,000 traveling faculty and staff members, CSU processes 25,000 vouchers and spends $10 million on travel a year. It selected Gelco in September 1997, and spent $105,000, plus an annual maintenance fee of $29,000, implementing the product.

Gelco installed Travel Manager in March, but it took an additional six months just to input the codes into the databases. All secretaries and approvers in each department eventually will have the software on their PCs, as will at least one person in each of CSU's 54 cooperative extension offices around the state.

While CSU has signed up for the Windows version, Overturf said she is "very interested" in the just-released Internet version because of the dispersed nature of its staff.

Travel Manager links the pre-trip approval and expense reporting functions. When a traveler submits a pre-trip report, it passes electronically through four or five approval levels. The individual or department can activate an e-mail messaging function that alerts users that a report is awaiting approval. Upon getting approval, the traveler calls the agency and books the trip. When trips are completed, travelers enter their expenses on the same pre-trip approval e-voucher, hand over the receipts to a secretary and repeat the approval process.

Reports then are manually keyed into the accounting system, which bills all expenses to a central account and then reconciles them monthly. Overturf said the university's IT staff currently is focusing on Y2K issues but hopes to begin building an interface between the two systems next year. She also is discussing the possibility of having Diners Club, which issues the university's 1,872 cards, prepopulate the reports with charge card data.

Another area in which the process could be improved, said Overturf, is inputting the many coding changes necessary when, for example, people change jobs. Overturf now must input changes manually.

Meanwhile, at Harvard--which spent $35 million in travel and entertainment, and processed 75,000 expense reports for 5,000 travelers in 1997--the main challenge was selecting a product that "offered flexibility in configuring the system," Schnur said. Specifically, the travel department needed a system that could accommodate the diverse e-mail, operating and hardware systems on campus.

Harvard also wanted a product that could accommodate its complex accounting requirements and decentralized expense reporting, approval and auditing processes. "Because we accept funding from sponsors, we require unique spending, tracking and routing," said Schnur. "We needed an expense management solution that is flexible enough to handle these special requirements, but streamlined enough to speed the process. With XMS, we expect to reduce reimbursement time from 15 days to two or three days."

Ease of use also was a priority, especially because Harvard is in the process of installing the Oracle enterprise system, which entails a huge training initiative.

Following several pilots, XMS will be rolled out on the university's intranet in January. With the intranet version, "we don't have to do 5,000 implementations of software on desktops," said Schnur, though the university will have to maintain the server. The ideal solution, he said, would be an Internet version, which the department has been "pressuring industry leaders to develop."

Configuring XMS's policy file component was a long process that involved keying in a line of general ledger coding for each line of expense and splitting each detailed line item into multiple lines of coding. Unlike Gelco's Travel Manager, XMS was not preloaded with government per diems, but they will be input in the system by October, Schnur said.

Harvard also is testing a major online booking system. Since 1995, the university has maintained an in-house booking function on the travel page of its Website, but it had little usage. Schnur thinks the new product will be more successful, thanks to better timing and the inclusion of the university's discounted rates.

By choosing the Web-based Extensity, UCLA, whose 6,000 travelers spend $25 million a year on travel, has perhaps opted for the most flexible solution. "We picked Extensity because it allows the user to work both offline and online, which is important to the university environment," said Beatty. "It's a lot easier to fill out an expense report on the plane or hotel room, rather than back in the office."

Another factor in Extensity's favor was that "the Java application makes it easier to access the system," Beatty said. She added that because the university's IT director was involved in selecting and testing the product, she was confident about the reliability of the Java application.

"Our travelers are sophisticated in terms of the Internet and computers," she noted. The Web-based Java application can accommodate the university's multi-platform environment. And she said that by the time the rollout to the university's 400 departments is complete--which she estimates will take 10 months--all users will have compatible browsers.

While Extensity can split funding at the expense-line level, the capability to split transactions at the total expense level as well was specially designed for the UCLA version. Another customizable feature is the ability to link various transactions to a single trip. Because a lot of UCLA's travel is related to conferences, transactions frequently occur months apart, and travelers typically pay a registration fee weeks before they book their tickets.

UCLA has no pre-approval process. Under the paper system, travelers have been individually billed and reimbursed. That will change with the introduction of a new corporate card, planned for early next year. Once the card is in place the automated expense report system will include prepopulation of data.

Ultimately, the goal at UCLA is to reduce the different types and sources of data. "When someone enters a booking into one system, we don't want to put the data into another one as well," Beatty said. "We'd like to link booking with reporting."

UCLA this month also is launching a pilot of Internet Travel Network's online booking product with 100 users. "They'll access the system through UCLA's Web page, and that reservation will be sent to the travel office," said Beatty. "We'll quality control it and issue the ticket."

Travel managers at a number of other universities also are seeking to automate their travel processes in the next year. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, has formed a committee to look into a new card program as well as test new online booking systems and expense reporting products. "We need a means of tracking our expenses," said MIT travel manager Ellen Sico.

Brigham Young University is putting together a request for proposals for an automated booking and expense reporting system that will be linked to a pre-trip approval program developed in-house, with interfaces to the university's back-office systems. The goal is "an end-to-end approach," said travel services manager Tim Hill. "Our 4,400 travelers all have cards, and we have a rent-a-plate arrangement with 10 travel agencies, with facilities onsite."

Some universities already have developed in-house automated services. Last December, Penn State, which spends $30 million a year on travel and has 5,000 frequent travelers, made modifications to an electronic form in its system to create an expense reporting application.

Because the system is in a database format and the university's new back-office systems, which are currently in development, will be in Windows, the travel department is faced with a choice of either upgrading the current system or buying a commercial product, Fink said.

For her personal technology wish list, "I'd like to see reconciliation between direct billing and the back office," she said. "In the database environment, we're doing three-way checks on every transaction to verify accuracy, and it's slow. I'd like to see it streamlined."

Penn State, which also has electronic pre-trip approvals, has signed new contracts with its five travel agencies that will enable them to provide self-booking systems linked to the travel department's Web home page. "Travelers would feel they have more control, but the agency would continue to issue the ticket," said Fink. Penn State's travel intranet site also has links to Sabre's public Travelocity booking site and other travel services, including advisories and passport information.

The University of Tennessee at Knoxville also is developing an in-house expense reporting system, although the one under construction there won't provide data. That's a shortcoming that concerns assistant to the treasurer Carol Baker, who knows first hand the cost of not having this information available. Last year, the university lost its contract with Delta Air Lines because its 15 travel agencies weren't reporting transactions in a timely fashion or a standard format, she said. The institution ultimately signed a new contract with Delta after consolidating with one agency, but only after waiting six months--paying full retail airfares all the while.