Sematech Automates Pretrip, Expense Report Processes

Austin, Texas-based International Sematech this month rolled out company-wide a homegrown travel system based on PeopleSoft technology that ties the company's pretrip authorization process to preferred booking channels and the expense reporting system, automating what had for years been manual, paper-based processes.

International Sematech manager of corporate travel and meeting services Bill Davidson said the overhaul of travel and expense was born one year ago following a companywide employee survey.

"They clamored for an improved and streamlined business process. Travel is the one everyone likes to focus on because it's a big impact area," he said. "We started with a couple of pilot teams throughout October and in the meantime have been offering training and signing people up. About a month ago, I sent out a thing to everybody saying that Jan. 1 was going to be the official cut-off date for going from paper to the tool."

Following the survey results, Davidson worked in conjunction with several other internal departments. He said the company "looked at every possible option," opting to maintain its pretrip authorization policy and build a new framework online to reach the traveler population.

"We put together a divisional team," Davidson said. "There was a project manager that was appointed who has a background in finance. We also had guys from finance, travel, and our technology division."

What began as a way to speed the travel booking and expense-filing process for the company's travelers emerged as an overhaul of travel processes and the company's new system addresses many of the qualms travelers had in both the travel booking process and expense reporting system.

"When you log on to the system to create an authorization or a travel request, it knows who you are" Davidson said. "It automatically recognizes everybody and prepopulates all of your particular data: who you work for, what department, what cost centers to charge, who you want copied on your itineraries. This used to be manual and they'd have to do it every single time. Now, they can just sit there and do the entire thing right from their desktop."

While the travel authorization tool from the traveler's point of view appears to be a seamless, end-to-end system, Davidson said there still is a human touch as travel authorizations feed through an approval process and in many cases—when the company's online booking tool is not used—the actual booking is handled by travel agents. "The look and feel of it is pretty much like your typical online booking tool. It's got those fields of data: what city do you want to depart from, what city do you want to go to, on which dates, which airlines are preferences, what times—either departure or arrival—work for you. It's the same kind of thing for car and hotel. It looks like a real booking tool but there's still human agent intervention and they can actually pull every approved record, print them all out in queue and book what they know is an approved travel request."

Travelers also now have much easier time filing post-trip expenses. Davidson said prior practices comprised Excel-based spreadsheets that necessitated travelers file each expense line-by-line and manually move paper copies for approval. Now, the company has a modified automated PeopleSoft system that requires only a little hands-on employee interaction.

"When the agents fulfill the reservation from the travel part, the status of that particular record changes to create the expense reporting shell," he said. "It carries over where the traveler went, what travel dates. Literally all the traveler has to do is go back in and open the same record that he started—except now it's an expense report—and complete his expenses. If you used the corporate credit card, it's all prepopulated."

Even though the company moved to pretrip authorization several years ago, the travel infrastructure did not adequately support it. Yet, the company quickly shifted to a centrally billed charge card account, initially for airfares, then for all travel expenses. While pretrip approval lent oversight to card-billing, the paper-heavy process slowed yielded inertia.

Davidson said the company would consider completely integrating an online booking tool or an online purchasing system. "The next logical step is to integrate that with the booking tool and that to me is a challenge," he said. "Even some of the booking tools that are more advanced have pretrip authorizations, which I don't want to have. What I want to be careful of is having a redundant path."

Travelers have welcomed the improvements. "The old process took a lot of people's touches and hours of involvement," he said. "The new system is 25 percent of that."