Merck Rolls Out Rosenbluth's E-Res Booking System
<I>Whitehouse Station, Pa.</I> - After a slow but successful trial of Rosenbluth's E-Res automated booking system, Merck & Co. is forging ahead with plans to allow 5,000 travelers access to the system by year-end.
If all goes according to the current blueprint, about 500 employees at or near Merck's corporate headquarters will access the system over the company's internal LAN, and 4,000 remote field salespeople will begin logging on over the World Wide Web in the third or fourth quarter of 1997.
Although that will be about a year behind the company's original schedule for an automated booking system, the company decided that a more measured approach would better serve both the corporation and its travel customers. Merck expects E-Res to pay for itself in administrative cost savings on Merck's $35 million air volume.
"We hoped to have something up by January 1996, but then we began looking at all the hardware issues and data security issues involved," said site services manager Ellen Roehm. "The system involves a connection from the internal Merck network to something outside the network, and any network connection raises major network security issues. And each person that got involved said there was someone else who also had to be involved."
Company Will Leverage Data
In the end, Merck and Rosenbluth assigned dedicated IS staffers to address the network support issues and to serve as primary contacts. Roehm credited those resources, "and the idea of getting everyone involved in the project at the very beginning," with the project's success. "We couldn't have done it with so few wrinkles if we rushed into it," she said.
As the system rolls out in 1997, the insights the company has gained will be put to good use. First, the data from last year "clearly showed that travelers who have travel arrangers do not use the system," Roehm said. In 1997, therefore, the travel arrangers themselves will be targeted.
Also new in 1997 will be a different bias in the hotel listings, designed to move market share to Sheraton and Hilton, Merck's global preferred vendors. Until now, E-Res brought up all preferred hotels in the 30 top destinations where it has negotiated hotel programs. But in October, Merck began loading Sheraton and Hilton hotels into every city database. Those properties will come up first when travelers request a hotel.
In New York, for example, there are seven choices of hotels, but the first four will be Hiltons or Sheratons.
"We expect travelers to choose those most of the time simply because they come up first," Roehm said. "That is not different from what a live travel agent does--it's just another way to move business to our preferred vendors."
With no data behind her to prove the system will indeed move market share, Roehm acknowledged that she did not get an additional discount for listing the two hotel chains online. "But that's not to say we won't ask for one in the future," she noted.
As a final change, at least for now, travel arrangers are testing the system by booking false passenger names, to overcome their concerns about the system not actually making the bookings they enter.
Roehm--a longtime Merck employee who recently returned to the company from maternity leave--spent about 85 percent of her three-day work weeks as E-Res project implementation manager. Among her tasks are the interface with network security and data security, user training, the help desk, systems administration and database management. Roehm reports to employee services director Mark Sylvestre.
Rosenbluth International spokeswoman Jeanine Schumaker said the Philadelphia-based mega agency has several customers using the E-Res system, and "a dozen or so more waiting for the Internet version," due out this quarter. Other product enhancements coming in the same time frame include live seat maps and the ability to handle international bookings and multiple destinations.