Siemens To Press For Universal Travel Cost Vs. Revenue KPI

A senior Siemens executive will plead tomorrow for buyers to introduce a worldwide standard key performance indicator that calculates travel and entertainment costs as a percentage of increased revenue from new orders and sales.

Denice Kronau, head of global shared services for Siemens, will use a plenary session at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference in Munich to argue that plotting T&E costs against incremental revenue is the truest way to understand whether a business is gaining true value from its investment in travel. Siemens already uses the KPI for its own travel program but would like other companies to introduce it so that businesses can benchmark the efficiency of their travel investment against one another. With an annual spend of €1.8 billion and 280,000 travelers, Siemens is one of the very largest buyers of corporate travel, but it argues that the KPI applies to buyers of all sizes.

"Our main intention is to have transparency about T&E costs of all sizes," Sabine Sehrt, vice president of international travel for Siemens, told BTN. "We want to set this up as a KPI industry standard and we are looking to ACTE to support us."

Siemens is hoping companies will benchmark the KPI not only for their total enterprise but also on a country-by-country basis, since the ratios are likely to vary. For instance, travel to China may account for a higher proportion of new orders and sales—which it brackets together as "business development"—than a program in Western Europe or North America.