Travel management company FCM Travel's consulting arm last week introduced a new software tool that automatically analyzes corporate air contracts. Dubbed Air Contract Intelligence, or ACiQ, the solution is available to any company with air contracts, not just FCM clients, according to the company.
How it works: FCM uploads a company's air contracts along with its data from its TMC, analyzes each contract for its value—such as making sure the contract is targeted in the right areas for a company's actual usage—and returns the results in a dashboard for the travel manager to review.
"Airline contracting is procurement, and procurement is a methodology. Where there's methodology, there's room for automation," FCM Consulting global head of customer management and consulting Jo Lloyd told BTN at the Global Business Travel Association convention in Denver. "The system does the work of overlaying one against the other to see where the performance is. We inject things like fair market share so we can understand if the targets that are in place in those contracts are also reasonable to the market conditions."
FCM piloted the solution with about five companies with multinational contracts, Lloyd said, to make sure it could scale, and fully launched it in mid-July.
The tool's output can get granular, such as the inventory travelers are buying, as well as a review of every city pair and company performance on each, to detect underperformance to highlight whether they still should be in the program or are missing, Lloyd added.
Essentially, "it's a solution to identify opportunities in one's airline program," said FCM Consulting air category lead Jason Kramer, adding that could be identifying new savings opportunities or means to improve contract performance, traveler behavior or benchmarking. "A lot of customers do this already, but most of this tends to be pretty manual or pretty expensive. … This really simplifies and makes the process more efficient and cost effective."
The price for the service will depend on various factors, such as the number of contracts, the complexity of those contracts and the number of reporting sources—if the data is coming from one TMC or multiple TMCs, Lloyd said.
"It can be a self-service platform where [the travel team] can use the analytics to manage the category themselves, or FCM Consulting can play a greater role in the category management of it," Kramer said. "It really is intended to drive savings on an ongoing basis and to get away from the two-, three-, five-year [request-for-proposals] cycle. What you're ultimately doing is optimizing your contracts when opportunities arise. … Because things can change between RFPs significantly depending on the type of company you are."