Case Study: Using Data Findings to Justify More Data Investment

"It's like herding cats," said Micah Collins, director of travel and property management for Schumacher Clinical Partners. She was referring to collecting travel spend data from multiple sources. "I might be dealing with six different reports from six different vendors, and that's not even from vendor direct [billing from] hotel or rental car."

When Collins came onboard in May 2012, the physician staffing company had an unmanaged travel program and a loose T&E policy. By December 2012, however, she and the travel vice president had buy-in from the company to implement a new travel policy, to deploy the Concur Travel booking tool and to bring in a travel management company.

To expedite booking until she could roll out Concur, Collins required travelers to submit travel requests to the TMC by electronic form. "We knew it would take a minimum of four to six weeks to build out Concur and were not willing to sacrifice any time [of people not] booking through the company preferred vendors," she said. The goal was to eliminate the back-and-forth conversations that often caused booking errors and delays and thus higher ticket prices.

Schumacher also had to train its roughly 200 employee travelers on the new travel program and convey that the travel department was there to help employees with travel and to give cost center managers spend transparency. "We tell our cost center managers and their employees that they're our customers because if we don't have that level of trust, then we're just another online booking tool and they would wonder why they need you," Collins said. Compliance also is a necessary component to proving the program's worth via spend insight and savings. Then, the travel department can secure additional executive buy-in to implement more tools and automate processes to help cost managers make smarter budget decisions.

At this point, Schumacher had more and better travel data coming in from multiple sources but needed an efficient way to manage it. The travel, IT, accounting and finance departments built a travel database in Salesforce to consolidate automatic feeds of TMC data, Concur bookings and expense data from Workday. There is room for improvement, however. The accounting department still has to upload supplier invoices and credit card statements into Workday manually. Plus the 7,200 of the staffing company's travelers are not official Schumacher employees and lack Concur profiles. Other non-employee travelers may lack a Concur profile, Workday profile or both. Their bookings and expenses lump together in the Salesforce travel database in a generic "guest" bucket.

Though getting the program and partners up and running sounds tedious, Collins said the travel program has improved matters. Within six months, 83 percent of travelers were booking through Concur Travel or the TMC. The average advance-booking window also increased to 17 days. And by the end of 2014, a pre-trip approval process was in place. "We started creating conversations between cost center managers, mid-level management and those booking travel," Collins said. "All of that allows us the ability to get the aggregate data I'm looking for because now I've managed to change the behavior on the front end. So when I go to fight the good fight to get money or resources, I know I have the good facts and trust [from travelers and cost center managers]."

Things Had Been Going So Well

In January, Schumacher switched to a TMC that it thought could help with the next step in data management: analytics. But that meant rebuilding its Concur configurations and remapping workflows to align with the new TMC. Meanwhile, in August 2015, Schumacher had merged with Hospital Physician Partners, which did not have a formal travel program.

The merger added 300 employees who did not yet have Concur Travel or Workday profiles to Schumacher's roster, requiring more manual entry. Among other problems related to the TMC switch, Schumacher's cost center and direct billing codes included special keystroke characters that the TMC's system did not recognize, so data was not feeding into the Salesforce database properly. The program became unmanageable. "Merging the companies' behaviors while transitioning TMCs destroyed everything that was built from 2012 through 2015," Collins said. "We had no idea how complex and hands-on our program was, and we had to go back to using raw data reports."

By April of this year—when Schumacher acquired ECI Healthcare Partners and gained another 100 employees to assimilate—it was clear to both Collins and the new TMC that things were not going to work out. Schumacher returned to its original TMC, as it was familiar with Schumacher's processes and expectations, according to Collins.

Rebuilding

The TMC changes and mergers, while difficult, shined a light on the need for the company to rethink its manual processes. As for the buy-in Collins had gained, she said, "Rebuilding the trust through exceptional service was the only way I could sell the program while the technical issues and reporting limitations were impacting our ability to utilize the tools we had created."

Collins has had to rebuild Schumacher's alignment with Concur a third time and is rebuilding the Salesforce travel database with its original TMC to include missing data. Schumacher is investigating which manual processes can be eliminated and which feeds can be automated and is determining how to import data feeds for travelers who don't have Concur or Workday profiles. The company is also considering implementing Salesforce Wave Analytics in 2017.

"It sounds complex, but what we're trying to accomplish is to just follow the money," she said.