In August, West
Texas Intermediate crude oil dropped to its lowest price per gallon since March
2009. The roughly 60 percent slide since June 2014 revitalized the BP travel
program’s attention to savings. Lisa Stanford, global airline program
procurement manager and travel technology vendor relationship manager, was
ready.
First, she demanded
that 10 days before any meeting she had with them, suppliers submit review data
on three challenge areas per country. “Supplier reviews had been backward
looking, and we needed to look forward,” said Stanford. “I didn’t want a
laundry list of ‘you-missed-it-by-two-segments’ discussion points. I had to …
have constructive conversations around making our contract commitments.”
The internal
challenge facing Stanford was translating those commitments to traveler
behavior. With the support of BP’s new COO, who had an interest in travel
costs, Stanford’s department sent out compliance reports, and they weren’t
pretty. “So we built an internal tool,” said Stanford.
The tool offers a
dashboard that drills down to the individual traveler to show compliance for
online booking, lowest logical airfare, 14-day advance booking, BP preferred
hotel and booking at or below the preferred hotel rate. Every traveler receives
a green, red or amber ratings, and that data can be rolled up to show
compliance at different levels: work groups, departments, divisional units and
so on. But most important: “Travelers can go in and immediately see how they
are doing in terms of compliance. No one wants to be on the non-compliant
list.” The dashboard also has created competition between units.
In six months,
overall U.S. compliance jumped 10 percent—and that kind of behavior shift has
translated into major savings. One of BP’s airline partners brought an
agreement to the table that was “frankly unbelievable to me and to my
consultants,” said Stanford. The commitment thresholds were very high, but with
her new visibility into data, Stanford took the deal.
Watch her talk about the leverage her data provides, and keep reading after the jump.
2015 Best Practitioner Lisa Stanford
BP’s Lisa Stanford, a BTN 2015 Best Practitioner, has achieved an “unbelievable” contract term from an air supplier, thanks to an aggressive commitment backed by muscular compliance data. She bet that, beyond promising a supplier revenue and market share, showing compliance data would assure the supplier of BP’s ability to fulfill its contract, even by a nonmandated program. In turn, the supplier delivered a stellar offer. The stakes were high, as failure to fulfill her hefty commitment would mean losing the contract, but with six months to make it work, BP exceeded its commitment.
“We have a very
mature program,” she said. “When I went into the RFP last year, I really didn’t
expect to see a lot of improvement, but we were able to move to about a 3.3
million incremental savings with our airline program, which was very
substantial.”