Several mid-office technology providers are building automated quality control functions into point-of-sale applications to reduce agent errors, better ensure corporate policy compliance and reduce reservation processing time, ultimately driving down transaction costs. They also are increasing the data flow into back-end reporting systems to deliver more robust and accurate reporting to their travel management company and corporate clients.
As the lines separating the front, mid- and back offices blur, the "mid-office has become a convergence and distribution point, rather than simply a gatekeeper," said TRX vice president of product operations Darrin Deck.
Meanwhile, global distribution system providers are adapting their once-proprietary mid-office offerings into the multi-GDS and open third-party environments.
Sabre Travel Network in the past 18 months has taken a modular approach to its mid-office products, enabling agencies to use other systems and move process automation to their points of sale. One such process notifies agents during the booking process that unused e-tickets can be applied to a trip. Like other processes, such notifications previously would need to wait until the booking is made and queued to the mid-office.
Moving processes to the front end can reduce inaccuracies, necessary rework and service fees. "In the traditional environment, those were often identified after the booking was complete and required rework by the agent and in many cases required re-contact to the traveler," said Sabre corporate segment marketing manager Steven Gillon.
The mid-office also plays strongly in ensuring proper corporate travel policy parameters are applied to a booking. With the new automation, more parameters can be applied to bookings through preprogrammed rules-based engines, rather than agents going through each booking to ensure policy compliance and use of the lowest logical airfare.
In this area, Sabre this year released the Sabre Scribe automated rules-based environment, which among other functions can replicate these policy quality control checks at the point of sale.
Travelport GDS is building some of its mid-office processes into its new universal agent desktop application
(BTNonline, Aug. 11, 2008). Doing so takes mid-office processing out of the "reactive mode" and actively applies business rules to a reservation, said director of product strategy Michael Harbin.
Travelport GDS is building software development kits and an application programming interface connection to third-party developers so travel management companies can mix and match mid-office products and services, and is building the model on agent-configurable, rules-based engines.
After integrating its mid-office portfolio into the Agency Manager selling platform in Europe and four Latin American countries, Amadeus is working on rolling it out in North America, said director of product management and support services Alix Arguelles. Amadeus also has opened its system to integrate with third-party technology and other agency systems, including all GDSs.
Arguelles said Amadeus' recent investments in quality control include file finishing, fraud management and document delivery, moving the entire reservations process further into a touchless environment.
"More and more with tools being made available in terms of quality control—to avoid any debit memos that may appear—and file finishing, we are getting to a point where a lot more will be touchless and only the most complex trips are going to require agency intervention," Amadeus' Arguelles said.
Meanwhile, other mid-office providers also are adapting their systems. TRX revamped its Correx mid-office platform over a 16-month period, building dashboards and programming modules for its agency customers to program their own systems. It now connects to all GDSs at higher speeds, in turn reducing data transfer times. The connectivity enables passenger name records to more easily flow in and out of databases.
In October, TRX plans to release a module that gives agents the ability to create entire new business processes for their clients and plug them into their mid-office products, said president and CEO Shane Hammond.
President and CEO Mat Orrego said Cornerstone Information Systems is integrating its mid-office products with more data sources, building APIs and new platforms to link with other third-party systems and enabling more information to flow into its IBank reporting and data management platform.
The company also is repositioning some mid-office tools to the front end, including ResMarker, an automated engine that highlights on an agent's screen certain rules to follow or reservation notes that used to be handled after the client interaction.
Cornerstone offers its users the ability to program the IQCX mid-office platform themselves, but most customers offload that work back to Cornerstone because of complexity or resource issues. Orrego said more than 150 agency customers use its ResQCX mid-office system, which is housed at the agency, and about 80 are on the Cornerstone-hosted IQCX system.
GDSX also has been changing its mid-office Compleat platform. The company in recent years has enhanced its rules programming by implementing a common system designed for multi-GDS agencies
(BTNonline, March 17, 2008). Last year, it started generating its own reservation data reports. Previously, it had only exported data into external reporting software.
While mid-office technology providers are making considerable strides in increasing agent productivity and driving down errors and costs, more work needs to be done in the other supplier categories, said Travel Leaders Corporate regional director of corporate operations Heather Allegrina-Bowe.
"The system is set up very well to capture airfare to make sure they secured the best rate," she said. "The system is not set up as well to do the same for car and hotel. Those systems have to catch up to that.