Profile In Travel Management: Cleansing Disparate Agency Data

Company: General Dynamics
Headquarters: Falls Church, Va.
2006 Air Volume: $90 milliion
With eight travel management company contracts for 15 business units, it's no small feat for defense conglomerate General Dynamics to compile accurate data and deliver it to suppliers for a travel program with $90 million in 2006 U.S. booked air volume. In 2007, the company's travel committee formed a data subcommittee to corral and account for lost spending, which previously caused the program to fall short of its airline marketshare agreements.

After compiling agency data with the help of TRX, the data subcommittee found a significant portion of air travel data not included in reports to airline data consolidator Prism Group. "This year has been a banner year for us in terms of getting our data cleaned up," said Tracy Loper, member of the data team and travel manager for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based C4 Systems, a division of General Dynamics that spent $15 million in U.S. booked air volume last year.

"There is always a variance in data booked versus flown," she said. "I would call acceptable a variance of plus or minus five points. We were seeing variances in the twenties. That's not acceptable. Now you've got fraud data. Now you are making decisions not based on good data and so are the carriers."

While some discrepancies amounted to variance points, reports at times were left off other business units entirely. "We told the carriers that we could tell, for example, that we have a business unit in Savannah, Ga., with a significant travel spend. When we saw our air reports and there wasn't a significant amount of activity coming out of Savannah or Atlanta, we had to assume that the data wasn't going where it needed to go and that's exactly what we found," Loper said.

The General Dynamics team saw the occurrence enough times to realize it was a recurring problem. "We had the air carriers coming back and saying, 'This is what you're doing,' and we were looking at it and saying that's not possible. The data that they were getting from Prism was not inclusive," Loper said.

Now, with the accurate data in hand, airlines have agreed to revise the data. To ensure consistency, the data team on a monthly basis reconciles the agency data from TRX with the airline data sent to Prism through the business unit responsible for managing the air contracts. General Dynamics also had its agencies send data dating back to January to TRX to help account for the variances. The same files were sent to Prism, and airlines were notified to revise the data back to January.

"We pointed out to the carriers that this is not a matter of us not delivering share, it's a matter of you not having the full picture. Then, we took on this project to have data regenerated and then re-marked," said Loper. "The goals are cumulative and the airlines come to you every month. If your January data is underreported, that throws off the whole program."

Before the introduction of the data committee, contracts were negotiated with the help "of an air analyst and then it was basically running itself. We had to listen to what the carriers were saying and we had no way to say, 'No, wait a minute, I am not sure that it's correct,' regarding market performance," Loper said.

Although the data was revised and used to reach service-level-agreement goals, Loper said contracts were not redone because they were based on consolidated historical data, which became the basis of the data variance. "We had complete data when we went to the table with them. We put together contracts based on that data, made assumptions based on that data and when the contract was implemented and we started evaluating our program, there were certain areas that weren't working. The data was saying we weren't delivering marketshare like we expected."

Loper recognized that there is blame to share for the discrepancies, including agency data, airline data and the nature of the General Dynamics travel program, which often changes its travel patterns. "Airlines are just as challenged as we are. The data is only as good as what the agencies give them," she said.

The travel committee is comprised of representatives from each business unit, including travel, finance, human resources and supply chain, which works on various sourcing initiatives and travel management practices.

The travel committee, which is part of the General Dynamics supply chain organization, was incorporated seven years ago to leverage cross-departmental subject matter experts, drive efficiencies and optimize the program. The travel committee chair gives quarterly reports to the supply chain, which in turn reports directly to the chairman of General Dynamics. "You get a real interesting mix of people at these committee meetings and that varied perspective has helped us," said Loper. "Pulling all the different functions into the committee has been very useful."