Motorola is one of the few companies in Europe that actually operates a multinational reservations center. The site is run in Glasgow, Scotland, by Business Travel International and handles bookings for Motorola employees in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Italy, with another 10 countries lined up.
The single center is producing a wide range of process efficiencies while also standardizing service and pushing up compliance, now standing at 98 percent in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. This explains why suppliers are eager to do business with the company, despite Motorola having cut its EMEA air spend from $86 million to $40 million since the economic downturn began two years ago.
The international center offers a better technology platform than is found in some parts of Europe, is a better point of expertise for fulfilling the online bookings that will start next year, but, above all, drives compliance—which Motorola and BTI find easier to enforce from a remote, centralized location. As a result, EMEA travel manager Terri Collins has negotiated better deals this year, including transatlantic travel in business class at coach class prices, and average fares 10 percent lower than last year.
Motorola opened the Glasgow center as a logical consequence of its strategy of efficiency through consolidation. Collins, who previously worked in finance for the company, in 1998 persuaded senior management to let her build a centralized travel program for EMEA. At the time, each business division within Motorola ran its own program, and the company used at least 15 different travel agents within Europe.
Her first major task was to replace them with one agency so she could consolidate management information and start to strike pan-European supplier deals. The next step was to reduce the number of agency locations in each country, including cutting from 12 to one in the United Kingdom—which accounts for 60 percent of Motorola's EMEA spend—in just six months. This was the dedicated outplant in Glasgow.
Using just one center in the United Kingdom, Collins said, was a wholly positive experience.
"We get best-in-class service and fewer than 1 percent complaints, which are usually about the vendor. We also have just one service level agreement, which makes both management and reporting easier. My e-mails are down by 50 percent. Then I thought, 'Why not centralize the whole of Europe? The entire company is English-speaking.' "
Collins and BTI have made several process changes to maximize the benefits of the Glasgow center, including aggressively promoting e-ticketing, which still tends to be used patchily by many European companies. Motorola's usage of e-tickets has risen from near zero two years ago to 70 percent in 2001 and 90 percent today.
This is particularly helpful for transacting bookings from overseas, but even when Glasgow has to issue paper tickets, it only costs Motorola $16 to distribute them anywhere in Europe. "It can cost more than that to send a ticket from a local agency office," Collins said. However, Motorola has opened a small office on BTI premises in Paris to handle ticket distribution in the countries that have adopted the euro as their national currency.
Having one reservations center also saves the company substantial local office and account management costs, which more than outweigh the higher telephone bills caused by international dialing. Fortunately, Motorola largely can avoid this expense too. It has created a simple e-mail trip request form on a Word document, which is used for 80 percent of bookings.
Other efficiencies introduced by Collins include an automated trip authorization system, plus use of Basys—the British Airways version of the Universal Air Travel Plan product—shortly to be improved and relaunched as the BA AirPlus card
(BTN, Oct. 7).Collins said Basys gives her more precise management information than any other option open to her, and also has created administrative efficiencies, such as reducing the number of personnel processing invoices.
On the agency side, Motorola remunerates BTI on the basis of a management fee divided by number of transactions, which enables her to reallocate the charges internally. However, once the majority of the process reengineering is completed within the next couple of months, Collins hopes to be able to cost a menu of pure transaction fees with BTI instead.
The net result of all these changes has been to create an extremely attractive travel program as far as suppliers are concerned, despite Motorola's drop in expenditure.
"The reason is that when times have been bad, we have stuck by our key partners and vice versa," Collins said. "They like the fact we are very open. We tell them everything, including how much we spend with other carriers."
One fashion that Collins has resisted is moving all airline agreements to corporate net fares. Motorola's contracts are a mixture, with the rebate on trunk routes tending to be at the front end and on less-traveled routes at the back end. Collins likes to use the back-end rebates to fund the travel department activities. "I prefer to keep the funding so I can invest in projects like introducing GetThere," she said. "It's a cleaner way of organizing my finances."