Travel Manager Of The Year: Bob Grant

<B> Travel Manager Of The Year: Bob Grant</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty

<I>Orlando</I> - "It does matter," acknowledged Bob Grant as he accepted Business Travel News' 1998 Travel Manager of the Year award--a play on the "it just doesn't matter" watchwords that guided him in reengineering the travel department of Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco over the past three years.

Grant had adopted the motto from the movie "Meatballs" to keep his morale up as naysayers said he couldn't manage Schwab's travel in the same way the company does most other purchasing. But Grant disregarded the critics and charged ahead, blessed with management's support and a mandate to go paperless.

BTN selected Grant for this year's award due to his efforts--and his success--over the past year in implementing a true end-to-end travel management system that added $1.9 million to Schwab's bottom line in 1997. Almost as important, Grant has made himself available to travel managers looking to duplicate his success in their own organizations.

In honoring Grant, BTN Editor-in-chief David Meyer noted that Grant is "not just an early adopter of technology, but has gone further in rolling out end-to-end travel automation--including online booking, management reporting and expense processing--than anyone else of whom we are aware. With a $12 million air spend, this professional has shown it doesn't take Corporate Travel 100 volume to leverage good deals or a high-tech company to pioneer travel management technology."

Grant began his reengineering in 1995, seeking ARC accreditation, writing a travel policy and negotiating preferred vendor contacts. Last year, he installed Sabre's Business Travel Solutions Travel Planner on the Schwab intranet. In one year, the company moved 25 percent of all transactions onto the automated booking system, reducing its travel staff by 40 percent and slashing FedEx bills dramatically.

Grant is optimistic that 30 percent of all bookings will go through BTS by Sept. 30 as reservationists now divert all calls for simple roundtrips to Travel Planner. The reservationists remain on the phone with the traveler to guide them verbally through their first automated booking, Grant said. Schwab also has deployed BTS' VantagePoint reporting system.

With the automation and means to control vendor selection in place, Grant has negotiated net airline, hotel and car rental prices. About 70 percent of Schwab's domestic and nearly 100 percent of its international air travel is on a net basis. Preferred vendors have remained the same since 1995, just after Schwab received it's ARC appointment.

"The ones that don't want to play are being held at bay," Grant said of those unwilling to negotiate net deals.

Since deploying the automation, Schwab has seen its costs per mile halved to just 19 to 22 cents per mile each month.

In June, Grant turned on the final piece of the end-to-end technology with the rollout of the IBM Electronic Expense Reporting Solution. Expense reports are prepopulated daily with data, relayed from Citicorp Diners Club via Sabre's Tulsa computers.

Learning from the struggles of this implementation, Sabre and IBM just announced plans to offer a more turnkey solution for other travel decision makers.

"Bob learned a lot from the process," said Sam Gilliland, general manager of BTS. "He told us what worked and what didn't."

One key area that Grant identified for travel technology vendors is having a single point of contact for such integrated implementations.

"There were days when I quite frankly wished that someone else did the pioneering," Grant said. "I might have waited for the technology. My perception was that this was all turnkey, but I was just fooling myself. The result is that I have the best travel processing in the country and we'll continue to save money with it."

Schwab has apparently taken note of Grant's tenacity. The company gave him responsibility for all food services as of July 1. Following the same process used to consolidate travel, Grant researched the company's spend on five cafeterias and for coffee and water for 309 offices. He also surveyed employee satisfaction with the coffee. He found that Schwab is spending $1.5 million on coffee and bottled water from 359 vendors. Even worse, 79 percent of employees said they only drink the coffee as a last resort. "So, we're buying it, making it and throwing it away," Grant said.