Travel Mgr. Meets T&E Deadline

<B> Travel Mgr. Meets T&E Deadline</B>

By Lynn Woods

<I>Tarrytown, N.Y.</I> - A year ago, Don Blaesser, product manager of the T&E reimbursement group at Ciba Specialty Chemicals, was faced with a daunting mandate from his company's top executives: select an automated travel and entertainment software product with reporting capabilities, electronic processing and negotiating tools, and implement it within a year.

At the time, Ciba Specialty Chemicals--which had just been spun off from its parent company, Ciba, after a merger with Geigy and Sandoz Pharmaceuticals--was using paper for all its expense reporting, with no uniform system among its six divisions, spread out at nine locations.

Blaesser and his team, consisting of representatives from each division, decided the most affordable solution was to use a third-party provider. "When you have a high volume of expense reports, it's more efficient to bring processing in house," he said. "But when you have a low volume, like Ciba, it's more cost effective to get a third-party vendor and pay for each expense report."

After looking at three products, Blaesser and his group selected Vin.net because it required little in-house support. The team also felt it was the most sophisticated third-party product in the marketplace. Vin.manage, the routing and preapproval tool, is the first such module available in a Web-enabled Java version. And Vin.client, the expense reporting tool, and Vin.admin, the reporting module will be available in Java by March.

"Vin.net has all the tools: user-friendly software, versatile and diversified modules, capability to interface with multiple general ledger systems, management reports, vendor summary reports, and direct payment to both American Express, our credit card company, and individual bank accounts," Blaesser said.

Ciba began installing Vin.client and Vin.manage in July. Six months later Blaesser's efforts have paid off: 83 of Ciba's employees, a total of about 1,000 people, have been converted to the automated system, and the one remaining division should be online by the end of this month. Although it is too soon to put a dollar amount on the resulting savings, Blaesser already could enumerate several benefits. First among them: a decrease in travel accounting staff, from six people to one and a half.

Second, formerly time-consuming changes to Ciba's expense reporting process now take seconds. When Blaesser recently implemented a companywide change in the reimbursement rate for mileage, for example, "it took five seconds" using Vin.net.

Third, Blaesser plans to run monthly reports on which suppliers travelers used and how much they spent--information that will prove valuable in his upcoming negotiations with airlines, hotels and car rental companies.

The company also saves time and money by not having to write checks to employees or to American Express. And an auditing function built into Vin.client automatically sets limits on expenses. When an amount exceeds the limit--say, an employee spends $1,600 for an airline ticket when the limit was $1,500--the report is kicked over to Blaesser's department.

When employees travel, all expense data from American Express is prepopulated in the reports. Employees file their reports once a month and send receipts to Blaesser's department. Cash reimbursements for most expenses are processed the day after Vin.net receives the expense report and deposited directly into the employee's bank account.

Two of Ciba Specialty Chemical's divisions also use Vin.manage to preapprove expense reports, though Blaesser said he plans to suggest that the company be consistent in not preapproving expense reports at any division. In the meantime, employees of the two divisions e-mail their reports to Blaesser's department. Blaesser accesses Vin.manage's Java site through a Netscape browser, pulls up the reports, reviews and approves them, and sends them to Vin.net. One advantage of the Vin.manage Java site, he said, is that he can check the archives of reports previously submitted by individuals.

While initially there were problems accessing the site, mainly because employees were using different versions of Netscape, the glitches were ironed out when Vin.net adjusted its site to all of the different versions. Blaesser is pleased at the overall smoothness of the implementation, but that's not to say it was a simple process, he noted. Although using a third-party vendor precludes staff involvement in computer programming, "You still need more internal support than you think," such as training the help desk. And since Ciba Specialty Chemicals had three general ledger systems, it had to build three different interfaces.

Maintenance--which Ciba has chosen to do itself--is another cost, as was the installation and maintenance of a private TCP/IP line to mitigate security concerns about transmitting financial data over the Internet.

Also not to be discounted is the resistance from at least some employees that any organization moving to an automated expense-reporting system probably will face. At Ciba, one division's unionized workers initially were reluctant to exchange their expense checks for direct deposits.

"We produced checks for them at first, and then gradually convinced them to change," Blaesser said. "You can't go in with a hammer."

The next stop on the tech trail for Ciba is to link up Vin.net with a travel booking system. Routing employees' booking information--including their airline ticket number, itinerary and class of ticket--directly into their expense reports will be another time saver, precluding the need to type itinerary information and yielding more valuable data for the company's travel department, Blaesser said.

Vin.net, meanwhile, has just released its entire solution--including Vin.client, Vin.manage and Vin.admin--in an Oracle, as well as its standard Sybase, version.

Vin.net also this month plans to begin offerring government per diems as an added feature of its expense reporting tool.