Paperless Push Starts With Travel At Aetna

Hartford, Conn. - Leading the way in a companywide push for automation, the travel department at insurance giant Aetna in July completed its transformation to a paperless environment by launching an online expense management system housed on the employee Web portal.

The travel department has been at the vanguard of Aetna's Internet initiative since February of 2000, when Terry Nichols, business systems manager, began the fledgling portal with the travel department. Nichols hoped the travel program would draw employees to the portal and that it would serve as a model of Web-based automation for other parts of the company. As it turned out, Nichols was right.

"In the beginning, we had a 'standard' travel program," said Jeanne Young, director of strategic sourcing for travel and aviation. "It was paper-based. We used paper tickets, paper records, paper applications for the corporate card, paper everything. Compliance to the travel policy was low. It felt like no one knew we existed."

Working together, Nichols and Young came up with a statement of strategic intent for the Internet initiative, a companywide plan to house all employee services on a single Web portal.

"The mission was to 'develop and provide customer and shareholder value by delivering cost-effective, self-service, user-friendly, fully integrated travel solutions' by December 2001," Young said. "That gave us about two years to transform the entire program."

June of 2000 saw the release of the first edition of the portal, which was built almost entirely by Nichols and her staff of seven. The only third-party involvement in the development of the portal was a single temporary technical consultant brought in from Microsoft.

Employee services housed on the initial version of the portal included travel—the AXI online booking tool from Aetna's travel management company, American Express, and answers to frequently asked questions—building maintenance, computer supplies and system access.

"For the first version of the portal," Nichols said, "we wanted to include relatively simple, repetitive stuff that people could easily use."

During the next year, Young and her travel staff of two worked to raise the profile of the platform and increase its utilization. "We had months of communicating to employees: 'No, you shouldn't call American Express to book your travel, or facilities for a light bulb,' " she said. " 'You should visit our portal for these things.' "

Young also lengthened the hold time for calls to American Express, while recorded instructions for using the AXI self-booking tool played for waiting callers.

Encouraging use of the portal was "not without obstacles," according to Nichols. "We were very paper-oriented. And we wanted to please our employees who didn't always want to make the switch to the Web-based environment. In the end, we took the approach of making it very easy for employees to do the right thing and use the portal, so they were left with no excuse for not using it."

In July of 2001, Aetna took another step in tightening the travel program by mandating self-bookings and the use of nonrefundable tickets.

"Employee communications detailing the changes were endorsed by the CFO, as well as myself," Young said, to give the new policies added authority. "We also developed a score card system to monitor noncompliance."

The results are striking. Since revamping its travel program, the company has cut its transaction fees in half, saving more than $500,000 in the past 12 months. Aetna has a 98 percent adoption rate for online reservations, which has allowed for a 43 percent decrease in travel staff headcount. The new policies also have brought Aetna's average cost per air mile down 25 percent, to just $0.22. Aetna's online expense reporting and reconciliation features just were rolled out July 3.

Since then, all expense reports have been filed online. Employees train to use the online expense reporting tool, and any reimbursements automatically are added to their paychecks. Young said the new process will save Aetna $200,000 annually.

"When we started our work on the portal, our annual U.S. booked air volume was around $29 million," Young said. "This year, we will be spending around $13 million," but Aetna's clout with its preferred carriers has not slipped. "We have been able to maintain the attention of the carriers in spite of the fact that we have a much smaller air spend than we had two years ago. Our suppliers say it's because of our tight travel policy. We have figured out how to use technology to run the program, and we have almost no seepage away from our preferred carriers."