Retooling Home Depot - 2001-07-16

<I>Atlanta -</I> Like hundreds, if not thousands, of travel managers, Cathy Spivey, senior manager of travel services for The Home Depot, last summer lamented the low usage of a corporate online booking tool she had rolled out a full year earlier.

Trip Manager, provided by Worldspan, had been processing an average of 8 percent to 10 percent of Home Depot's reservations, hitting 15 percent "in a good month," Spivey said. When a tightening economy prompted a companywide initiative to shave costs last fall, Home Depot introduced a new pre-travel authorization process that included an option to submit requests automatically through Trip Manager.

Drawn to Trip Manager rather than sending e-mails and faxes, Home Depot travelers as of May had quadrupled their usage of the booking tool.

With 45 percent of domestic reservations funneling through the system, the company avoided adding two budgeted agent positions and, according to data collected for the month of March, is benefiting from an 18 percent lower average ticket price on trips booked via the system versus a travel agent.

The new pre-trip authorization "truly was the turning point," Spivey said. "We had the product in place since mid-1999, when we had done a campaign and training, but that wasn't enough because the travelers still had so many options," she said. "I can remember hearing about pre-approval processes and I couldn't imagine doing that in our environment. With the phone-based method, any traveler with a corporate card had carte blanche to make any travel reservation he or she wanted. But that was then."

With the economy beginning to sputter last fall, Home Depot's senior management challenged every department to find ways to cut costs. Spivey responded by convincing senior management that a pre-approval process would reduce unnecessary travel. Having offered three mechanisms for pre-approval--Trip Manager, e-mail and fax--the e-mail requests by the end of 2000 still outweighed those sent through Trip Manager. As a result, Spivey tweaked the travel phone line's menu of options to emphasize "help with Trip Manager," and staffed that help line with four end-user support agents, including herself, to field questions and concerns about the system.

"We made sure there was plenty of staff there to answer the calls, and we kept it staffed with four until March or April, when the calls started to decline. Now, we have two people and it's clear that we helped shift requests from e-mail to Trip Manager."

Trip Manager's pre-approval system at Home Depot works by prompting users to indicate their vice president's name when finishing a reservation. When the reservation comes in for fulfillment, the travel department looks for the name of the approver and sends an e-mail with the itinerary to him/her, and the traveler after the tickets have been purchased.

"Yes, we have voided some tickets," Spivey said, "but it's advantageous for approvers to see actual dollars, which they only get through Trip Manager. The department heads have thus encouraged staff to use it so they can see those prices and make a decision.

"It could be that, sometimes, you're pinching pennies to save dollars, but the goal was to constantly remind people that you need to question this travel," she continued. "The ownership then goes back to the people responsible for the budgets."

Home Depot earlier this month printed and distributed a new travel policy that was updated after using essentially the same document for more than a dozen years. Communicated along with an endorsement by senior management, the new travel policy clearly states the new procedures for pre-trip approval and online booking. If travelers fail to book trips through the travel department's multiple channels, they will not be reimbursed.

Like many other corporate travel buyers, Spivey took the precaution of requiring that bookings that needed to be made within 24 hours of the trip be made by a travel agent. The Trip Manager system also notifies business travelers to contact an agent for help with more complicated trips with multiple or international stops. Only about 3 percent of the company's total travel is international.

With hindsight, Spivey said that she would have held off on the full rollout and implementation of online booking until all of the company's vendor deals completely were loaded into the system.

"We sent it out in kind of a raw form," she said. "It had our air and car deals, but it didn't have accurate hotel information. You can't really plan too much." Now, when travelers request a hotel in a given city, the system lists only the hotels with which the company has deals. "It took a week to load, but now about 30 percent more of the online reservations include hotels," Spivey said.

In terms of increasing awareness and comfort, Spivey noted that while a couple years ago it made sense to have training sessions, now they get very little response. Instead, travelers generally are capable of using the product with a simple text-based guide.

Going forward, Spivey plans to implement an automated quality control system that will reduce the manual intervention in fulfillment, thus allowing simple reservations to be processed hands-free and perhaps enabling the elimination of another full-time position.