Savvy Travel Managers Unite, Don Consulting Hats
<B> Savvy Travel Managers Unite, Don Consulting Hats</B>
By Mary Ann McNulty
Veteran travel managers Judie Shyman and Bob Lichtman are joining veteran consultants Bob Langsfeld and John Fazio in a new travel management consulting firm called The Corporate Solutions Group that officially forms this week.
Tapping their years of experience in managing travel for their own corporations--as well as leadership roles in the National Business Travel Association--the new firm will specialize in the adoption of technology to transform travel management.
Although Langsfeld, Fazio & Associates wasn't actively looking to expand, the partners said the calls it received from Shyman and Lichtman about career and industry issues prompted a discussion about forging a larger, bicoastal consulting practice--in which "this isn't the end," Langsfeld said. "We now have three of the top 20 travel managers in the country," with years of experience in government contracting, cutting-edge technologies, agency consolidation and systems integration.
Langsfeld said the new size of the consulting practice also will help it compete on some of the larger system-solution contracts that perhaps they were edged out of as just a two-person operation.
Shyman, who this week ends her two-year term on the NBTA board as immediate past president, chair of the strategic planning committee and liaison to the chapter presidents council, said she called Langsfeld & Fazio late last year as she was exploring new career options. With her husband retiring, the couple wanted to relocate to Tucson.
Shyman resigned her position as manager of travel, training, employee services and community relations at GEC Marconi (Hazeltine) Aerospace Systems in Greenlawn, N.Y., earlier this month after 14 years with the company. Before that, she spent two years with a corporate travel agency on Long Island. British Aerospace now is in the process of buying her unit, so her position will not immediately be filled.
Ironically, Langsfeld & Fazio also had talked to Lichtman about his desire to help others apply some of the technologies transforming travel management. Although Lichtman will continue in his position as global travel manager for 3Com Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., he plans to do some consulting work.
Long term, Lichtman plans to finish up some of the travel management initiatives he began over the past 16 months and continue in strategic travel management as a consultant, as his new partner John Fazio has done at Mitsubishi.
Since joining 3Com in 1998, Lichtman bid out the agency business, consolidating travel for North America and Israel with Rosenbluth International, France with Carlson Wagonlit Travel, the United Kingdom and Ireland with BTI Hogg Robinson, and Scandinavia with American Express. He also renegotiated all airline and car programs, developed a worldwide hotel program, launched a travel intranet site, and next month will roll out Sabre Business Travel Solutions' online booking system. The company also began outsourcing consolidated data management to International Software Products with plans for enterprise rollout of the data this summer. In addition, Lichtman brought in Vickie Smith to manage a meeting and events program. Lichtman began in travel management nearly a decade ago with SynOptics, which merged with Bay Networks.
In consulting, Lichtman said, he wants to concentrate on projects that use his expertise in selecting and deploying travel technologies and scaling travel management programs from small to much larger budgets. Many companies in the Bay Area are grappling with their travel programs, he said, as they expand faster than the program infrastructure.
Former travel manager Terry Sullo, who recently was hired by Salem State College to establish a Center for Travel Management, also plans to do some project work for the group. Earlier this year, she left her position as manager of business development for GTE Internetworking of Cambridge, Mass.