Visit the sidebar to this story, "HUD Scores Gains From End-To-End E-Gov Travel Services"The U.S. General Services Administration recently completed deploying its end-to-end E-Gov Travel Services program that fully integrates and automates all travel booking, reporting and reimbursement processes in one Web-enabled system.
In the past year, GSA completed the migration of 82 federal agencies onto the E-Gov Travel Services platform. The program encompasses about 93,000 travelers and $6.5 billion in consolidated annual expenditure. GSA books 3 million annual transactions, 2 million of which include airplane tickets. Twenty-four of the largest federal agencies represent 93 percent of the total transactions.
The GSA program does what many in business travel have only dreamed about, despite several strides in linking parts of the end-to-end process, like booking and expense tools
(BTN, Sept. 20, 2004).Bob McCauley, vice president and program manager for CWT/Sato Travel's E2 Solutions, said the GSA end-to-end process begins when the "traveler files a travel authorization that goes through a workflow approval process based on the nature of travel. The authorization is approved, creating an obligation against the budget for that trip. The travel is performed and if any changes take place, the authorization can be amended. The traveler completes a voucher and pulls in expenses laid out in the authorization, then completes specific expenses incurred on that trip. The voucher is sent to an approval flow process where approvers look at the expenses. Once approved, the voucher is audited electronically or manually by the agency. It is then sent for payment through the financial system to the Treasury."
GSA's program is akin to a corporate shared services model, said Tim Burke, GSA director of the office of travel and transportation services. Once the federal government consolidated its travel expenditures and implemented a governmentwide policy, private vendors were prepared to take on the heavy investment of developing and supporting the effort, he said.
"We made the decision to have industry invest totally on the solution, and if we were able to mandate the use, then the industry could compete for that volume," he said. "That made our 3 million transactions available to the industry for the first time through a single procurement vehicle. Our ability to have a standard policy in place as a backbone enables GSA to procure goods and services and distribute them in a way we couldn't before: with industry partnering to do most of the investment. The federal government spent very little money on capitalizing the start of this."
Burke expects the current capabilities to move to a "more refined service-oriented architecture to enhance the end-user environment."
Previous travel management support systems, which were largely manual and paper-based, cost the government $180 million each year, but similar processes through E-Gov Travel Services are expected to cost $405 million over the entire 10-year contract, which expires in 2013.
GSA selected three primary vendors for the initiative: Electronic Data Systems, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems and what is now CWT/Sato Travel. With the systems operational, "the vendors have an asset and can go to the marketplace right now," said Burke, adding that the three ETS systems are "flexible on functionality and capability."
Corporate travel buyers already have expressed interest in applying GSA's model to their programs, as have travel management companies, Burke said.
"We've created a mini-market, and there is an interest level commercially that otherwise wouldn't have been there," he said.
However, many corporations use disparate travel technology components, and those who have invested heavily in their own technology may have trouble justifying the expense of an enterprise rollout of a similar system, said Carlson Wagonlit Travel vice president of marketing in North America Brian Hace.
"In the corporate space, people are using different tools and technologies and have different goals and ways to implement," said Hace. "There is a lot more flexibility required and variation for corporate accounts versus large government divisions. Everyone is going to decide what's best for their company and the travel management companies and technology providers will have to react to that."