BTN Names Northrop Grumman's Chang Travel Manager Of The Year

Business Travel News last night named Janice Chang, Northrop Grumman corporate director of travel, meetings & special events planning, its 2008 Travel Manager of the Year.

BTN editor-in-chief David Meyer, in presenting the award, said it was given to Chang "for leading the improvement of the internal hotel request-for-proposals process and development of an automated tool that streamlines hotel negotiations, improves negotiated rate accuracy, expedites auditing, helps consolidate suppliers and supplier data and has reshaped the industry's standard hotel RFP template."

While the internal hotel RFP tool has been in development at Northrop for a number of years, it proved its mettle in the past year as Chang and the Northrop travel team of four wielded it to shorten the hotel negotiation season significantly, facilitate all negotiated rate loading by Oct. 1, reduce the preferred property base below 1,000, considerably surpass hotel program compliance industry benchmarks and yield considerable savings as 85 percent of hotel bookings come in at or under the per diem rate.

In addition, the tool enables the travel team to conduct its own rate audits and through the improved RFP collection and rate loading process, rate accuracy has surpassed 80 percent. The process not only has made life easier for Northrop's travel team and travel councils across the company, but also has increased efficiency for hotels answering the RFPs and enabling them to instantly load as many properties as they want into the system.