Technology Helps Cisco Deal With Doubling Growth
<B> Technology Helps Cisco Deal With Doubling Growth</B>
By Mary Ann McNulty
San Jose, Calif. - Transforming the way it communicates to its ever-growing employee ranks, Cisco Systems Inc. also is transforming the way those employees book, expense and report their travel.
Last month it deployed an online booking system powered by GetThere.com to all 14,000 employees in the United States, with a rollout in the United Kingdom this month. At the same time, the company is working on the gradual implementation of a new electronic expense reporting solution, powered by Extensity, with a four-week pilot in five European countries. Provided all goes well, deployment will continue around the globe by next July. Once both travel applications are deployed, the travel team will begin working on connecting the booking and expense solutions.
The movement toward such technologies has been driven in part by the company's use of Web applications for performance reviews, insurance, exercising stock options and most communications. "Everything we do is on the Web," said Jennifer Loftin, manager of travel and expense technology for the San Jose, Calif., company. At Cisco, technology is viewed as the only way the company will be able to scale its support services to deal with the booming work force, expected to grow from 18,000 to 40,000 by the end of 2001.
"I would have to hire 45 agents to deal with that growth," Loftin said.
Cisco has been evaluating online booking systems since 1995. When GetThere.com--along with several competitors--added profile synchronization this summer, Cisco finally had a product it felt comfortable deploying.
A five-person committee, comprised of a vice president sponsor, information technology specialist, project manager, travel manager and Loftin evaluated both booking and expense solutions. Beyond functionality requirements, the team assessed whether products were aligned with the company's technology tools and standards. "We had to have confidence in their ability to deliver and talked to references using the products with high adoption rates," Loftin said.
Last December, the company also came to a crossroads with the internally developed expense reporting product, called Metro (BTN, Sept. 14, 1998). Although the tool was working fabulously in the United States, processing more than 1,000 expense reports a month from 3,000 employees, it needed two major overhauls, an offline version to allow employees to complete expense reports while on airplanes and a version that could be localized to fit the tax rules and regulations of various countries overseas. The high development costs to add those features prompted the company to take another look at third-party expense offerings, most of which didn't exist when Metro was developed. It selected Extensity to power its new expense application, appropriately named, Metro II.
For meeting planning, the company has opted to develop its own application. By year-end, Loftin is hoping to begin testing Meeting Express, a Web-application that will store and provide access to all venues with which the company has negotiated rates and services. Through Meetings Express, Cisco should be able to determine how much it spends on meetings.