Profiles In Travel Management: Tech Helps Co. Take Bite Out Of Travel Spending - 2009-07-27
Company: Align Technology
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
2009 T&E Volume: More than $6 million
Align Technology manager of travel operations Ellina Arakelova in less than two years has taken a little-followed travel program and brought compliance and savings to new heights by overhauling policy, consolidating with one travel management company and integrating its online booking and expense management and reporting processes. With the implementation of Concur Travel & Expense, Align's air and car rental compliance has reached 98 percent and 100 percent respectively, and cost savings have risen rapidly.
Arakelova has used the enhanced visibility into actual expenditure data, as well as new features of the end-to-end system, to target the remaining small pockets of leakage through expense-side audits and greatly increase preferred hotel program compliance by using an application that adds hotels booked outside of the system to the traveler's Cliqbook and TMC-generated itinerary.
In the first year following the February 2008 implementation of Carlson Wagonlit Travel as its U.S. travel management company and Cliqbook as its self-booking tool, the Santa Clara, Calif., maker of dental product Invisalign achieved a 51 percent savings, including decreases of 56 percent in TMC costs, 26 percent in cost per air mile, 21 percent in average air ticket price, 35 percent in the average car rental rate and 23 percent in average hotel room night costs.
In February 2009, Align rolled out Concur Expense for automated integration of the online booking and expense software. Arakelova, who worked in tandem with the finance team on the integration, gained the ability to compare actual expenses and factor in surcharges and ancillary fees. "That is absolutely priceless for budgeting," she said. "Of course, it's not exact, but for budget purposes it's a great number."
Before the travel program overhaul, Align travelers primarily booked outside of the company's preferred channels on public booking sites. Arakelova, who joined Align in September 2007, deployed a communications strategy that included a Web-based travel portal, e-mails and in-person and online Cliqbook training sessions. In just two months after moving about 500 travelers to Cliqbook, the company reached 75 percent adoption. Align policy does not require travelers to book online, but they must go through either the agency or the self-booking tool. "As soon as the travelers saw how it works and what they are able to get from it, and the managers understood the approval process, it wasn't a difficult task to drive adoption of the online booking tool," Arakelova said.
Align's travel patterns and its expanding clinical education events make it difficult to maintain and develop compliance with a preferred hotel program, Arakelova said, noting that 60 percent of hotel stays are booked outside of the system. In addition, only 40 percent of the company's hotel expenditure is for transient travel. The rest is handled separately by the meetings department.
To see trip purposes and distinguish meetings from transient bookings, Arakelova began working a year ago with Concur developers to enable travelers to attach a non-Cliqbook booked hotel reservation into the itinerary as a passive segment. The company also updated its preferred hotel directory. It now is implementing Carlson Wagonlit Travel's policy messaging tool to enforce hotel booking policy.
In August, Arakelova plans to roll out a new set of expense report audits.
Align has an annual U.S. booked air volume of between $2 million and $5 million and a total travel and entertainment budget of $6 million to $10 million, 70 percent of which is generated by domestic travel. Despite the company's worldwide growth, trips are down about 10 percent in 2009 compared with last year, and spending has declined 35 percent.