<B> Rosenbluth Reengineers</B>
<I>Tech Approach To Include Travel Avoidance</I>
By Sarah Welt
<I>Philadelphia</I> - Rosenbluth International is embarking on a research and development effort to build a new computer system designed to evaluate why corporations travel--and to suggest to customers that travel avoidance may in fact be the best way to hold down costs.
The mainframe-based decision support system, like Rosenbluth's current Dacoda system, will focus on helping customers make the wisest possible travel decisions. But it is a different system than Dacoda, using different algorithms and data sets.
The system will form the core of a new consultative approach at Rosenbluth, to be called "business interaction management--a term we coined for helping companies affect their business better than they do today," said president Hal Rosenbluth. "We believe that we can help companies have their people be more effective some of the time by not traveling and other times by traveling more. Really the goal is to help a company define and understand the behaviors that cause people to travel."
Rolling out now, the initiative is being headed by Rosenbluth's chief travel scientist Danamichele O'Brien. Among her first responsibilities will be the selection of a university partner, hopefully by next month, with a goal of beginning to "test the hypothesis" by early 1999.
While part of the focus of the program will no doubt link up with Rosenbluth's videoconferencing partnership with Englewood, Ohio-based TeleSuite Corp. (<I>BTN,</I> Aug. 3), O'Brien said that "TeleSuite is just one small part of a solution."
Rosenbluth will launch the business interaction management initiative with five corporate customers, including DuPont and Oracle Corp., whose travel managers will help define the parameters of the program.
Rosenbluth's focus on consulting follows a trend among travel agencies to redefine their role as that of value-added consultant rather than simple order taker. American Express and Carlson Wagonlit also have beefed up the consulting services they offer (<I>BTN,</I> June 22 and Aug. 17).
DuPont, for one, is eager to get a better understanding of how its employees handle travel. "The question of how you determine when you should and shouldn't travel is not one that we've asked before--at least not of Rosenbluth," said global business travel manager Joyce Bembry. "We've asked it and tried to get some data internally, but we haven't been totally successful."
Rosenbluth has come up with "a very interesting way to quantify the issues of how to avoid travel, when to travel and what is the most effective way to travel--to measure it and have a scientific approach to it," Bembry said. "I think it will be well worth the effort."
Many in the industry agree that with the onset of agency fees and the competition of online booking systems encroaching on their traditional market, travel agencies increasingly see consulting services as a new business model.
Said Tom Wilkinson of The Travel Management Group of Alexandria, Va., "To be really value-added partners or suppliers in the next decade, travel agencies must become more consultative. This shows Rosenbluth realizes the need to carve a broader role for itself."
While Wilkinson said he doesn't know of any other product in the market like the one Rosenbluth is planning, he also "doesn't know of any need for it. It will be a competitive differentiator for Rosenbluth--but not necessarily one that keeps its competitors up at night."
Carlson Wagonlit's senior vice president of expense management and strategic planning Mylle Mangum said the Rosenbluth initiative "sounds like benchmarking, which is a large part of what we do in Business Advisory Services," Carlson's consulting arm that launched last year.
"The issue to me is not necessarily travel avoidance, it's how best to utilize a company's T&E resources. It's really the optimization of the resource, and that can come in a lot of different ways," including videoconferencing, consulting and meetings management," Mangum said.
To that end, Carlson uses workflow modeling as well as public and private data that it stores in databases and aggregates. "We don't have a mathematical formula that leads you to X conclusion, but a process we actually map against the strategic objectives of the company," she said.
American Express' Consulting Services unit, launched in 1982, focuses mostly on travel policy, in many instances applying trip-specific policies to different kinds of travel within corporations, said spokesperson Melissa Abernathy. While it does handle some projects where the goal is cutting down on travel, "that's not the predominant request" of most customers.
Rather, they ask Amex to "help them look at travel policy to see if they are doing at least as well as, if not better than, their peers. If not, they ask us to help them achieve a goal of X percent more efficiency or cost effectiveness," Abernathy said.
O'Brien noted that this new initiative is not Rosenbluth's first foray into consulting, which has been part of its business model since the early 1980s. At that time Rosenbluth reorganized around the idea that general managers and account managers would handle consulting responsibilities for clients. But now, "We are so flat that our managers have regular business planning reviews and sessions with our clients, so we don't need a whole extra consulting arm that is detached and disenfranchised from the operations of the business day to day."
Hal Rosenbluth said that the new initiative comes as the result of a more volatile global marketplace where businesses "are asking fewer people to accomplish more. And if people can in fact accomplish their business mission without having to be out of town all the time, it is going to help companies to better attract and better retain people as well.